Senate Governmental Organization Committee

“California’s Deadly Heat Wave—Evaluation of Government’s Response, Direction for the Future”

August 9, 2006State Capitol Building, Room 3191

Sacramento, California

SENATOR DEAN FLOREZ: I appreciate everyone being here. Let’s go ahead and call the Senate Governmental Organization Committee to order. I do know that Senator Denham was here a minute ago. He’ll probably join us and I know that we have members that will be in and out of the committee hearing. We have Appropriations, as well, this morning, so I, myself, may need to step out at some point to present some bills, so we look forward to having committee members come down. Senator Soto’s here. Thank you, Senator Soto, for joining us.

Let me go ahead and start and give you a—you all see the agenda. There’s a slight change in the agenda. Just if you have it in front of you, we’re going to have the president and chief executive officer of California’s ISO testify right after our professor. And so that will be just a small change and to accommodate and hopefully that is helpful as well. We look forward to listening to you.

The way this is going to work, I would like to make some remarks to give you pre-warning that these are long remarks. And I want to make sure we get it on the record. We had some very good meetings with the Administration over the last couple of days. And I just, I told many from the Administration that the most important part of this hearing will probably be the transcript. So I will ask the sergeants to make sure that we diligently provide on the record comments, so that the Governor’s task force, when and if they continue to meet, have something to go from and to go back and look at this transcript and make sure that everything indeed is on the record.

That being said, I want to make sure that my comments are on the record and I want to make sure that we’re real clear in terms of the task force looking at some of the issues that were somewhat bothersome to me, and I do want to say at the outset that we’re very appreciative of the Governor’s calling that task force. And hopefully it will create some good work.

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On the morning, as most of you know, of July 14th, Californian’s woke up to the start of a reported third heat wave of the summer. Unlike the previous two, this heat wave turned out to be one of the longest in state history. This lasted about 16 days. Some areas of the state recorded 15 straight days of consecutive triple-digit heat. And as most of you know, unlike previous heat waves it engulfed both Northern and Southern California shattering individual temperature records across cities throughout the state.

It also brought us to the verge of rolling blackouts and that’s why we’re very happy to have the ISO present here to talk about how much megawatts, record megawatts of electricity we consumed to keep cool. It laid to waste, as most of you know, about a billion dollars and counting of agricultural crops and killed numerous farm animals. And most importantly, contributed to the deaths of upward of 164 people in the State of California. Needless to say, it was a tragic natural disaster. More people died in this recent heat wave than died in the last two earthquakes combined. And the loss of life, as most of you know, is somewhat staggering. A hundred and sixty four is a big number.

It’s widely reported that the Fresno County Coroner’s office ran out of space. Many people had died and bodies, in many cases, piled up, two cases to a gurney. Hospital emergency rooms were inundated. Emergency responders were run ragged answering calls for help. And at the end of the day, emergency crews responded very courageously, and local governments held their own under many difficult circumstances.

People went out of their way to check on friends and neighbors, and did their best to beat the heat. Fortunately, our electrical grid didn’t run out of power. We had enough. However, thousands of electrical transformers did malfunction under the relenting heat that never cooled off in the evenings, in many cases, leaving at least two million or more households and businesses throughout the state in the dark and without critical air conditioning. The extent of the blown transformers has brought to light a new and quite serious weakness in our state power grid, which I hope to discuss today, particularly with the ISO chief.

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On July 27th, 14 days into the heat wave, I send a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger asking that he declare a state of emergency. The day before the death toll had reached about 50, one of the regional trauma centers in my district had temporarily shut down because of surge in demand, thousands of homes in Southern California had been without power for at least five days. And only two days before there was concern about rolling blackouts as recognized by the Governor and weather forecasters have reported continued heat for the remainder of the week. I saw the situation as an emergency. I believe that warranted immediate attention and the enormous resources of the State of California to provide and make sure that we would, in essence, not have any further loss of life.

Unfortunately, the Governor did not act on that particular appeal, and I will tell you I do still stand by that request and I recognize the Governor’s prerogative to make that decision, but we also, in many cases, have to live with the consequences of such decisions. I really believe the Governor should have declared a state of emergency even sooner. As most of you know, we moved into a stage two power alert days before, and with lives of people, the balance of their lives riding on air conditioning, not declaring an emergency would have, I believe, or declaring an emergency would have allowed us some preparation, if you will, in the likelihood of large sections of the state actually losing power.

Perhaps today’s hearing will allow us to look at some protocols that are in place if indeed a state two power alert is called and whether an alert should automatically be considered, in many cases, combined with other factors a state of emergency. Good things have been done.

Under what kind of things could have been done under a state of emergency? I've been asked that many times. Let me just mention a couple. Number one, the Governor could have modified the work day to lower the peak demand on the system. He could have ordered hospital emergency rooms to stay open. He could have closed non essential state offices. Could have released state agencies’ employees to knock door-to-door to check up on the elderly. He could have even take prisons off the power grid for a while, put them on emergency generators to allow us the power to continue forward.

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It’s rather interesting that in the State of Missouri for example, the governor declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard to help evacuate people to cooling centers. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg took prisons off the grid and started their own generators that I had mentioned earlier, to provide and ensure there was enough power so people could actually keep on their air conditioners.

There are many things, obviously, that have happened that I think an emergency declaration would have helped on. And I think today, and interesting enough, given that stage of power alert, we today have this opportunity, this unique opportunity, this window to talk about how we can be better prepared for the next heat wave, and we know that there are going to be many more heat waves in the future.

I got to tell you that we’re all remiss in this. This isn’t just the Governor. It isn’t our local governments. It’s the people sitting at this dais, as well. We were caught in many cases—we acted in many cases with complacency. We acted like many of the folks out there who failed to turn on those air conditioners. We didn’t recognize the severity of the crisis. We thought we could handle it. And with each passing day, things tended to get worse. Bottom line, I think we were caught flat footed. And what concerns me the most is that we have a whole infrastructure. No apparatus is supposed to pull all of these important clues together to make an assessment of the danger that we face, that was supposed to provide us with resources and a plan of action and is responsible for protecting the health and welfare of the State of California. In my opinion, that did not happen to the best we put forward.

It’s my overall opinion that what’s lacking in our emergency response system is an early warning system. A system that our state and local governments can use to contact the most vulnerable citizens during any type of natural disaster. I know that local governments did their very best and after many hot days and mounting deaths, went door-to-door in many cases contacting the elderly, and others to check on their welfare, and I very much appreciated the effort. I think it’s interesting, however, in terms of an early warning system, that most of us know that during a political campaigns,

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politicians have no problem finding a phone number to ask people for their votes. And yet, we in many cases, call four or five, six times. Yet during an emergency, somehow, we cannot seem to find you? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, so I think at some point in time, we need to figure out what that system will look like. We’ve had great discussions with the Governor’s office in terms of looking at such a system. And I believe, quite frankly, and particularly in rural areas, many of the folks are very isolated, that is true. But, we need to work on a way to find those people to check up on them during a heat wave and the bottom line is, we need to make sure that we have that system in place.

What bothers me probably the most, and we’ll talk about at length in this hearing is why does the state seem to always respond after the fact? We knew hot days were ahead of us, we knew that we were breaking electricity records. We knew that the state had the resources to push down to the locals if indeed we needed to do that. And the goal here today is to figure out how to make that happen in a much more coordinated manner.

Let me just simply wrap up on one point. And people have said somehow this inquiry, this oversight hearing is political. I got to tell you that for those of you who know me, I’ve had a lot of oversight hearings. People thought my Oracle probe was political. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter about party. I think the name of the game for this committee is having the ability to do oversight. It means that we are to, in essence, go through the checklist. Make sure that we are actually doing the best we can do. And we’d be remiss not to have an oversight hearing on a real case study where 160 Californians lost their lives. There’s no doubt that we can make sure that we can do a better job. Absolutely everyone can do a better job. Today’s hearing is really about how we can make sure that we do that.

As I mentioned earlier, we are very, very thankful that the Governor has created the task force. We’re very, very excited to hopefully see some very good recommendations come from that task force. And at the end of the day, I think this legislative body’s job is to understand this tragedy to learn lessons for future tragedies, and more importantly, I think we are duty bound to act. And real question at the end of the day is what did we do right and how can we build

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on those successes? And I thank everyone for coming today. And I very much appreciate Professor Eric Klinenberg for coming from New York to give us his perspective. He’s a very highly respected urban sociologist, and obviously the author of a book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago , and we very much look forward to asking you some questions, listening to your perspectives and what we’ve learned in other portions of the nation. And that let’s go ahead and have you come up. And as you’re coming up, I’d like to ask members if they have some comments. I know Senator Soto has a comment.

SENATOR NELL SOTO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and good morning. I really want to thank you for calling this hearing, Mr. Chairman. In sheer numbers, heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other natural phenomenon. The impacts are often not obvious, but they are dangerously real. About a dozen of the victims of the recent heat wave were from Riverside and San Bernardino Counties so it does concern me greatly.

As a state, we must be ready to take necessary steps to protect our residents and that includes providing them with subsidized air conditioning units and subsidized rates and other needed services. We must also be ready to rein in the state agencies that have oversight over heat related issues. In these agencies, if these agencies are failing to protect our residents, for example, in addition to approving several rate hikes over the last year, the PUC recently reinstituted mandatory time of day programs. Not only are these programs regressive in nature, low reduction is achieved on the backs of the poor. But, they are drastically unrealistic.

Studies have found that over 60 percent of California rate payers are unable to reduce their loads significantly, making these programs ineffective and expensive. These are among the issues that we have to address if we are to avoid another disaster of this magnitude. And I thank the chairman for calling this committee and I look forward to this committee hearing and I look forward to what we have to do today.

SENATOR JEFF DENHAM: Thank you. I look forward to a great deal of testimony here today. We’re looking forward to learning more on all of the various things that we can do better. I appreciate the fact that the Governor

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has convened a task force. I think that it’s important not to only to evaluate the lives that have been lost and the damage that has been done, but also to look forward and make sure we’ve got systems in place so that we can respond very, very quickly.

I do want to give a special thanks to the Governor for spending so much time in the Valley throughout the heat wave. I think that it was important to pull together leaders through the various communities in discussing some of the different challenges that we were having county by county, as well as spending a great deal of time through the farm labor community and the agriculture community and understanding that piece of the challenge, too.

We still have a great deal of labor in this state that is continuing to work in these very hot conditions. And we need to be cognizant of those various challenges. And one of the things that we had talked about in great detail was the amount of regulation that was put in last year that we feel was a good preventative measure to reducing the amount of fatalities that we had in one of the largest heat waves we’ve ever seen. It could have been far worse. So I was glad that California was proactive in leading the way for the rest of the nation, something that I think proved very important as we saw this heat wave hit us this summer.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, yes, oh, I’m sorry, Senator McClintock. I apologize.

SENATOR TOM McCLINTOCK: Just along those lines, I do think it’s important we keep perspective as Senator Denham touched upon. There’s always room for improvement and I’m looking forward to a productive hearing today. But, we also need to bear in mind how much worse things could have been. And had the state’s electricity grid collapsed under the weight of the biggest heat wave that we’ve seen in many, many decades.

The grid was able to provide power despite record demands, demands that absolutely shattered anything, collapsed the system under the Davis Administration. And I do think that we need to be cognizant of the central defense Californians have, and that is a reliable power system. A great deal more needs to be done. We came a little too close this time for any kind of

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comfort. We still do not have the electricity capacity that we need, but we have come a long way since the dark days of 2001. And I think that one of the primary focuses of this hearing needs to be what do we do to assure that the electricity grid of this state is able to handle future loads of this magnitude.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Yes, absolutely. And I agree with that completely, Senator McClintock. Professor, thank you for joining us, and we’re very interested in getting your perspective on this. And thank you for coming out from New York.

PROFESSOR ERIC KLINENBERG: Well, than you, Senator Florez, and members of the committee. It’s truly an honor for me to come here and lead this discussion today. Let me say from my decade of doing research on disasters and their aftermath, that disasters are almost always political events. I think Hurricane Katrina busted the myth of a natural disaster for many of us, and I’m late in coming into the process of understanding what happened here in California now that I live on the other side of the country, but, I take great heart in the fact that this hearing is being held today. It’s a great part of the politics so that we do better next time around.

What I want to talk to you about today is both why heat waves have become so deadly both in the United States and beyond, and also some simple things that California and other states could do to make heat waves far less catastrophic in the future. And the material I’m going to be presenting to you, some of it comes from original research I did for my book which is called Heat Wave, and the book is a social autopsy of a disaster, because my argument is that the human losses and the human suffering that come from extreme weather is often due to social factors as much as the climate. And I thought it would be noteworthy for you to know that this research was conducted when I was a graduate student at the U.C. Berkeley Sociology Department, a great public institution, so next time you debate on funding for the social sciences in California, every once in a while we can help.

Every summer I get calls from startled journalists around the country. They’re amazed because they hear me on the radio or they read a quote from me in the newspaper reporting that in typical years heat waves kill more

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Americans than all of the other so-called natural disasters combined. I’m talking about earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Our official statistics about the human damage from heat waves dramatically understate the amount of human damage, because typically what we rely upon are heat related death figures--I’ll explain that in a second, rather than excess death figures. And that doesn’t give us a very clear sense of what has happened.

To understand an excess death from a heat wave, we look at how many people normally die during a given period of time, say the month of July in California. And then we look at that month or that week, as the case may be, for a period of extreme heat. We look at the difference. We factor out other things that may have caused a spike, some kind of disease, a major accident, and try to get a base line for the real human damage. But, conventionally, the numbers we hear are heat related death numbers, the 164 that Senator Florez reported, those come from individual level exams, the medical autopsy or a police report. That might sound like a more rigorous way to count it, but the truth is that when you have a state as large as California and you have an elderly population that’s most at risk, it’s inevitable that many of the people who die are never actually investigated. There’s never a police exam. There’s never a medical examination. They’re buried before anyone knows that their death has something to do with the heat. So, typically now, public health scholars are convinced that the measures that we’re talking about today, this 164 figure, is really, those are really inadequate. We need to find better ways to do this. We could discuss this later.

Why are reporters and sometimes officials so surprised that heat waves are this deadly, that they kill more than the other disasters combined? Well heat waves get very little attention in the public, usually until something like what happened in California happens. And why is that? Well one of the reasons is that heat waves don’t make for very good television. If you close your eyes you probably have a stock image of a hurricane or an earthquake or a flood in your mind. But if you close your eyes and try to think of a heat wave, you’re likely to draw a blank. It’s not great to look at.

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The other thing is that heat waves don’t cause a lot of property damage, although in an agriculture region they can kill a lot of livestock. Sometimes that gets more attention than the human side of this. And historically compared to other disasters, heat waves have not attracted the interest of influential interest groups and lobbyists who set a lot of policy for us, or at least have some degree of control over what happens in places like this.

It’s very hard for Americans, I think, to recognize how dangerous heat can be and part of that is that because for the middle class or the wealthy, avoiding danger is as simple as turning on an air conditioner. You press a button and the disaster goes away. And unfortunately, for millions of Americans and for residents of this state, too, that’s not a realistic option. Unfortunately what oftentimes happens in the aftermath of a heat wave because of that, is that many people question whether the disaster was as large as had been reported. That never happens with a hurricane or an earthquake.

So part of the reason we don’t k now about heat waves is because the heat is invisible. But, another reason is that the people heat waves pinpoint are themselves invisible in much of our political and public life. The victims of heat waves are primarily the elderly, the poor, the socially isolated, the sick, and in California and other agricultural regions, farm workers and day laborers can also be disproportionately affected. I know from spending time in California that every year there are reports of heat related illnesses in the fields, sometimes heat deaths. I remember that last year there was some special legislation to address these issues. I don’t know where that stands in California, but clearly that’s the kind of issue that this state should be paying attention to.

Many people are also surprised at the scale of recent heat disasters in very recent American history. In Chicago, the focus of my book, more than 700 residents died in a heat wave that lasted just about two and a half or three days. Extremely high temperatures, more than 100 degrees which lasted that period of time. Chicago also had humidity that made the city feel like 120, 125, truly disastrous weather. And the deaths were unbelievable. The story you described in Fresno of so many bodies going to the morgue that the medical examiner had to turn elsewhere to find storage. That happened in Chicago in massive

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proportions. The city had to bring in 10 refrigerated meat packing trucks to handle their remains. It’s the kind of disaster and spectacle that no one wants in their state, but unfortunately, we need to be thinking about that.

After the Chicago heat wave, many of us who do research on this tried to sound an alarm. Let’s not make it possible for public officials to say nothing like this has ever happened before. How could we have known about the risk? Unfortunately, our message only went so far. And in 2003, I’m sure many of you now have heard about the French heat wave which killed about 15,000 French people. That heat wave lasted three weeks. What’s less reported in the media is that throughout Europe, that disaster killed around 35,000 people in excess of the norm. A major catastrophe. And we don’t really know, my argument is, just how many people died because of this most recent heat wave in California. I hope at the end of this hearing it will be impossible for anyone here to say the standard response, this never happened before.

I come here today out of some concern that more extreme weather during the summer is on the way. I’m sure you’ve seen reports that the seven hottest years on record have all occurred since 1997, and all 10 of the hottest have come since 1990. I saw a report yesterday saying that the last seven months of this year have been the hottest in recorded history in the United States. Unfortunately, I think the climate change means that dangerous times are ahead of us.

We’re not just concerned about high day time temperatures, and I know that one reason there was a slow response in California was because many communities feel like 100 degree heat is something we see every day. But one of the things that we’re seeing now, a change in the weather that’s of some significance is that we don’t get low evening temperatures. Meteorologists talk about high lows these days. And that means the residents can literally be trapped in heat in a new and disturbing way.

One reason that you get such high lows is that we’re living in a period of extraordinary urbanization. And cities create heat islands. They attract the heat with concrete, tall buildings, skyscrapers, and then they trap the heat, because cities generate pollution. And that’s one reason that we need to be

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especially concerned about city residents during heat disasters, as worried as we should be about isolation in rural areas, and that’s a profound issue, cities tend to be the places where heat waves are most destructive. There’s also a population based reason for that. Cities tend to have concentrations of impoverished elderly and vulnerable populations. So it’s not just the weather. It’s also a demographic reality. That today there are more Americans who are living alone and aging alone, and sadly, also dying alone than ever before in our nation’s history. So changes in the nature of our population make these weather disasters more potentially dangerous.

And for Americans, especially those on a fixed income, the cost of air conditioning, both the units, but also just the monthly cost of paying utility bills, can be prohibitively expensive. Despite that, there’s also tremendous wealth in this country and in this state, and what we know is that every summer we top records for energy use during extreme periods of summer heat. There’s a real crush of demand. It’s difficult to be a utilities provider now for that reason. All of us need to think seriously about what to do when the weather gets hot. The suggestions you mentioned about requesting that offices close down and that we make special arrangements should clearly be addressed. But, this issue of power, its affordability and access to air conditioning is serious.

It’s also— UNIDENTIFIED: (INAUDIBLE) PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: I’ll get to that. It’s an important issue at

the federal and also the local level. It’s important to know that fear of crime has been linked to heat deaths in recent years. In other words, residents living in neighborhoods that have high levels of violent crime have a tendency to seal their windows as a survival strategy, keep windows shut at night so no one can break in. During my research in Chicago, I spent a lot of time with people who reduced the amount of time they spent outside, because they’re worried about crime. Neighborhoods that don’t have the standard resources that many city dwellers take for granted are also less likely to draw vulnerable people out of their homes and into places where they can get social support or air conditioning if they don’t have it already.

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So let’s just hammer home this point. We can tell from looking at previous cases of heat disasters that there’s a social geography of vulnerability. Some neighborhoods, some places, some people are at risk. What you’re seeing here is a map of Chicago, and these black dots represent the places in the city where the heat deaths were clustered in 1995. And if you spent time in Chicago, you’ll know that this represents what’s famously called the Black Belt, the south side and the west side neighborhoods that are home to the city’s segregated, largely impoverished African-American communities. They bore the brunt of the heat.

So in my work I’ve often argued that we live in a kind of time where there’s a formula for disaster. We have extreme weather. We have an aging society. We have the rise of social isolation. Literally, people don’t have the same kind of social contacts when they’re elderly. We know we live with inequality, energy issues and everyday problems with providing health care for the elderly and the poor that become exacerbated, potentially lethal during summer weather.

Why don’t we know more about them? Well, part of this I’ve explained, heat waves have historically proved to be easy to ignore and also, sadly, easy to forget. I’ve gone back to Chicago in recent years and found that very few people actually remember the scale of the 1995 disaster. It’s taken heat waves in the last couple of years to make it a public issue even in Chicago. But, after the heat disaster there, the New England Journal of Medicine editorialized that unlike other disasters that kill far fewer people, the stories of heat waves are usually forgotten as soon as the weather changes. And that’s really too bad.

But, what I want to do is not just focus on all these things that have gone wrong and reasons that we should be worried. I think what’s exciting about today’s hearing is that there truly are some very easy, and I have to say, rather inexpensive things that governments can do to either prevent heat disasters, or at the very least, reduce harm. And I just want to go through them quickly, so they’re on the record and so you can take them up and do further work.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Actually, you don’t need to go through that portion quickly, because I think that’s the, one of the major reasons we’re here, so take us through as much as you can.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Well, Senator Florez, I have to say that on this first point, I am truly in agreement with you. The most important thing, perhaps, that you can do at the beginning, or even before a heat wave arrives is to take it seriously as a matter of public policy. And that means issuing an alert, potentially an emergency alert in the way that you would if a hurricane was approaching the city. I oftentimes think about the way our country gets transfixed on those images of hurricanes moving up, those beautiful, multi-colored maps that we all look at on the television for hours every time the hurricane season hits. Well, Katrina notwithstanding, in recent history, hurricanes have actually been far less deadly than heat waves. And so it makes you wonder why is it that we don’t look at those heat storms approaching in the same way. We know long in advance when this dangerous weather is about to approach. So the easiest thing you can do if you’re running a political agency is to issue an alert.

Now governments have partners in the project of public education. And so I would implore the government to work closely with local media. And I would implore local media to take seriously the challenge of educating the public about the dangers of heat. Today if you live in the City of Chicago where they now have taken seriously those dangers, you can’t help but know how dangerous heat can be. It would be nice if other places learned the same lessons.

City governments can work with local media to provide information about precisely who is at risk, the elderly, people living alone, people with mental illnesses, the poor, people who don’t have home air conditioning, for example. And the media and government can also tell us simple things that we can do to save lives, to protect people before disaster strikes. And there’s some exceedingly simple things, so I’ll get to my second point.

Exposure to air conditioning if only for a couple of hours can be all the difference. You really get spikes in heat deaths when you have prolonged

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exposure to heat, uninterrupted for 48 hours or more. So any kind of interruption in that cycle is likely to ward off catastrophic damage. Unfortunately, many Americans, we know, don’t have a reliable helping hand, someone who can say to them, looks like something is going wrong with you. And one thing that happens during early stages of heat stress and heat illness is people often lose their ability to understand their own temperature level. They lose their capacity to understand what’s going on in their bodies. So it’s very important to have someone looking at you, checking up on you. It’s nice to say to communities, make sure you check up on your vulnerable members, check your family members, check your neighbors. But, the reality of American life today when there are more people living alone than ever before and when oftentimes family members live hundreds or thousands of miles apart from one another is that that kind of moral persuasion can only go so far. Governments have to be more aggressive about it. So what can you do? Well, the third point is to do this kind of outreach.

I've heard some discussion here about insuring access to air conditioning and this is hugely important, so let’s talk about what the challenge involves. We know for example that there are certain places that are most vulnerable in heat waves. Single room occupancy dwellings and I heard a radio report this morning about the difficulty in Sacramento of getting AC in single room occupancy dwellings. Nursing homes, public housing facilities are all less likely to have air conditioning unless there’s special policies making sure that they do. Ideally, you want to have air conditioning available in every unit, but for various reasons, that can be prohibitively expensive or technically impossible in some old buildings. So at a very minimum I think you want to have public spaces in all those places, lobbies, perhaps, where there is air conditioning. And you want to have local staffs trained to make sure that they bring people down and prevent that.

Many cities today, in fact, it’s become almost conventional for cities to open up cooling centers. Open your public library or recreational facility and have air conditioning there. That’s a terrific thing to do, but it doesn’t do anything to help the people who are most at risk, if we’re talking about people

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who are isolated and frail and don’t get around. If you’re going to make cooling centers work and you’re going to target the most vulnerable population, you have to have special transportation programs to get people there. Chicago learned this the hard way. In 1995 it opened up cooling centers everywhere. Very few people used them. Subsequently, it’s done a much better job.

And again, when you debate how to protect farm workers and day laborers, there’s a special set of things you need to do. Air conditioning is ideal. You can even use a bus, for example, and bring people inside of a bus. But, if that’s not possible for whatever reason, making sure there are shaded areas, special breaks to get people out of the fields during hottest times of the day. Make sure there’s an ample supply of water. All those things are really crucial. The agricultural deaths are oftentimes the most tragic, because they are people who are very young and healthy. So I’d encourage you to take that seriously.

SENATOR DENHAM: And those were all implemented last year? Were those a part of the summer’s program?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Yeah, so if California already has policies to protect farm workers on the books and they’re durable, then I congratulate you. You’re ahead of the curve in that respect.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And not without a struggle.PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Yeah. Key policies need to target the most

vulnerable people and places. One of the most important and innovative things that I’m beginning to see cities do these days involves producing lists or even registries where people opt in and provide their names, their phone numbers, and their addresses so that they can be contacted when a disaster or crisis of any kind hits. So we are talking about policies that will be helpful not just during heat waves, but also during other potentially catastrophic events. Those people include the elderly, seniors living alone, people being treated for mental illnesses, the list that I have described so far. I was in Chicago last week when the heat hit there and it was more than 100 degrees, also. And literally thousands of people were contacted. They were either called up by the city workers who come in and work a call center that the city operates, or they were checked up on through door-to-door programs.

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Cities have community police officers, people who do social work for the Department on Aging or the Department of Health. It’s very easy to do this kind of work once you do the work of finding out who’s vulnerable. And this is the kind of program that disaster planners call an all hazard preparation program. I really encourage you to look at it seriously. Setting up a call center, reaching out. Use these local agencies to help.

Disasters of all kinds, heat waves included, require good leadership and preparedness. One thing that you can do if you’re foresighted is to monitor the intake at hospital emergency rooms. The situation you described here in California with hospitals going on bypass status because there were so many sick people coming in that they didn’t have enough staff to handle the load, that happened in Chicago also, and it happens. It’s the kind of thing that we need to worry about in all kinds of disasters. So you need a system to make sure that you’re monitoring intake and that you can see when people start to come in for the early stages of heat illness before it really becomes deadly. And then if you haven’t already issued an emergency alert, then you really get into crisis mode, because that’s a sign that something dangerous could be happening.

In Chicago I should note, in 1995, about half of the city’s hospitals went on bypass status. And there was no centralized system for telling paramedics and ambulance drivers where they should take people. You know, which emergency rooms were open. And I got reports in my research of people being driven for up to 10 miles on city streets during a crisis like this, and that’s particularly a problem, because when you have a heat related illness, what prevents it from becoming permanently debilitating or lethal is immediate treatment. The faster the treatment the safer that person will be.

And the next thing you need to do and this will be the last big point I make, is to coordinate a response across agencies. One real lesson from Chicago in 1995 was there was no central response from the mayor or from the governor or from anyone saying this is an emergency. I want every agency involved in planning. And what happened is that it fell to local department heads to make decisions about how many resources they should allocate to the emergency plan. And unfortunately, they didn’t recognize the dangers on their

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own. So in the fire department in Chicago, for example, the fire department manages the paramedics. And the paramedics kept calling for back up. They wanted additional ambulances. They wanted to bring in additional staff. And the fire chief at the time was actually reluctant to release those goods. They were worried about cost overruns. Things didn’t happen.

The Health Department actually had provided a heat emergency plan. It was on the books. But, they forgot that they had it there. And without the, you know, instructions from above, they never went into an emergency alert. And there are a number of things down the line, so coordinate and use that leadership from the top. That’s why it’s so important that the highest levels of government take this seriously.

And let’s get to where we are today. When a disaster does strike as it did in California in July, have sessions like this. Learn from the mistakes. Don’t go on vacation which oftentimes happens in heat waves. And in Chicago, most of the major leaders in the city were at their beach homes. That was also true in France, by the way, and a very high ranking Minister of Health wound up resigning the post. Top officials from all over government were out of town. And this happens, because in July and August a lot of people go away. You don’t want your B team managing what could be the worse local disaster you’ll have in decades.

Don’t hide the problems. What you’re seeing before you and this is probably not so clear on the Power Point screen, but the City of Chicago actually never held hearings about why 739 people died. They refused the requests of several aldermen to do that. Instead, the Mayor’s office issued its own report. The Commissions’ report is not bad and it’s actually been a template for some very good policy innovations. Chicago, as you can tell from my words, has become a true national leader here. But there was no public discussion about this report whatsoever. And part of the reason is that you’ll notice that the cover for the report does not include the term, “heat wave”. And it actually has a snowflake on the cover. There’s no reason to try to spin your way out of this.

I flew across the country for this hearing in hope that California, as it has in so many other things, would truly take the lead and push not just residents of

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this state, not just officials in this state, but also residents and officials across the country, perhaps the world, to take this issue more seriously as the climate changes, as society ages and as we all become more vulnerable to these kinds of human catastrophes. I asked the question of how many more preventable deaths it will take for governments to take to treat heat waves as serious health hazards. And I hope in closing that today is the beginning of the change. Thank you.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you very much. That was very good. Questions from members? I have just a couple, if we could. I’m very interested in a couple things you said. The map of vulnerability.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Yes.SENATOR FLOREZ: In other words, being able to, for cities and

particularly for the state to understand that we don’t have to poll the whole state. So in other words, the chance of a heat wave hitting Palos Verdes, California, given the incomes and the area, the coastal nature, we can start to decipher out a lot of areas of California and really, from a state perspective, get down as that map provided for a city, but for a state, we can actually pinpoint, in essence, where those areas of vulnerability are for heat wave.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Yes, I’m confident that your health researchers have mapping facilities.

SENATOR FLOREZ: They have GIS and all that stuff, now.PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Exactly. They can use state of the art

technology and pinpoint precisely the places we need to be most worried about.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, and so once we, so we can actually come up

with that map and those were based on not just as we would call locational factors, but also as you mentioned, some of the issues with income, economics, you name it. Correct?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Yeah, in Chicago for example, the Gold Coast on the lake which has the cities most wealthy residents was not much affected.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Sure, so if I were to go into an area, in the Central Valley, for example, and I just picked every area that had a free school lunch

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program, I’d probably pretty much be getting into those areas that are the most vulnerable. And of course, other areas are vulnerable, as well, but that this is the highest risk level most likely.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: There are many proxies for this. I know that in Illinois, the Department on Aging or the Chicago Department on Aging also knows precisely where their concentrations of isolated elderly residents. They know where there are concentrations of single room occupancy dwellings, so they can pinpoint it even further.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Well, I know the state collects an enormous amount of data, because and we sit and talk about where the data goes. We collect so much data that we’re worried about selling it to other folks, because they know that California is the clearing house for most of that. So I’m very interested in continuing to have discussions, and I hope you’ll participate a bit with the task force the Governor’s put together in trying to narrow it down. I know that Fresno and Bakersfield isn’t worrying about a tsunami, but I also know that some of those areas aren’t worried about heat waves. So I think there’s some areas where we can actually concentrate and try to produce that map, and then we can start to think about how much service people get in that area from the State of California, so that local government may not have to take the whole burden.

You mentioned the fact that coordinated agencies, in many cases, make decisions. And probably they make decisions on the amount of resources before them, and I’m sure somebody in Bakersfield, California, doesn’t say, doesn’t matter what it costs. Let’s just get it done. I don’t think, unless they’re making those types of decisions with an assurance that money will be forthcoming and will be coming immediately, not after the fact. So I think that’s one of the things that I’d like to ask you. Do you see that happening in terms of when people make decisions on these types of endeavors in Chicago and other areas, are people making them based on the amount of resources before them or are they making them based upon what was needed at the time, from a pure health perspective?

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PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: I think the issue with heat waves has not been resources in the past. As I mentioned, I’m talking about some of the most inexpensive harm reduction programs that you can imagine in the world of disaster prevention. My view is that our history of failing to deal with heat wave has come from just a lack of political will to address the issues of the, about the vulnerable populations. And that the problem with heat waves historically has been that the people and places most affected just haven’t had the clout to get policies that protect them. So for example, if it were the case that the residents of Palos Verdes were most affected by heat waves, I’m sure California would have much better heat policies than it does.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Probably true. You also mentioned that last point. You said something kind of caught me—you press a button and the disaster goes away. In other words, press a button and you’re allowed that respite of air conditioning, and Senator Soto mentioned earlier at the beginning of this. I thought that was a very true metaphor. You know, there is that break period where if you, in that 48 hours you mentioned that you could refresh yourself. We learned that on the heat wave issue with farm workers and shade and water and some very simple things. But, we’re talking about the ability to press a button and in many cases, being able to save your life.

In Chicago, we’re interested in what you’ve found. Were people making decisions not to turn air conditioning on? There was a case here in Sacramento where, you know, two blocks from the Capitol or I’m not sure how far it was, two gentlemen died, and yet they had an air conditioner. You know, and the question for the panel would be, well, whose fault is that? Is it government’s fault? Is this something we can actually make them turn that air conditioning on? Are they making those choices based on the ability to pay for prescription drugs, pay for their rent? Think they’re going to weather it out. I mean, at the end of the day, what do you think about that sort of choice.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: I did discover a small number of cases like that in my research in Chicago. And I have to say that the media reported on those cases as if they were the norm, even though that was far from the case.

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It’s a very dramatic story to hear that someone has an air conditioner and didn’t turn on the button.

It does speak to a serious problem about the affordability of home energy. And I think this is a crucial point even if the numbers are small. I did research for about five years in Chicago to really understand what was driving peoples’ behavior at all levels during this crisis. And I did in my time there meet a very large number of elderly and relatively poor people who were living on fixed incomes who reported to me that balancing the costs of living had become very difficult for them. They said that during the winters in Chicago which can be extreme, as you know, they were oftentimes forced to choose between heating and eating. And they also said that even the idea of using air conditioning seemed far fetched. Some of them had air conditioning, not many. But what they were finding is that the costs of running their air conditioning were so prohibitively high that they feared that if they did use it they’d wind up not being able to pay for prescription drugs, for example. And these were very difficult cases.

So then I did some digging and it turns out that there are a range of social policies designed to provide energy subsidies for low income people at both the local and also the federal level. Now at the federal level there’s a program called the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). It’s, I think, one of the kindest American social policies there is. It offers support for low-income people to get usually heating during the winter. We’re now just discovering that, you know, you can use it for summer also. Every year there’s an enormous battle on The Hill over funding for this program. It just, I think, is, well it may or may not withstand the latest shock which was a vote to cut the funding by a billion dollars that came during the hottest year on record in the United States. In fact, just days after the Chicago heat wave in 1995, the U.S. Senate voted to cut funding for LIHEAP. It’s politically one of the most vulnerable programs around and again, I think they’re not great interests for demanding it.

So at the federal level, I think we need more support for LIHEAP and every time I talk to local administrators, they tell me it’s one of the most popular

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programs for our poor, and it’s the one that runs out long before it can really work. But, then at the local level, there are also a range of very innovative policies that involve subsidies for energy use for the poor. Some of that comes from, you know, private sector cooperation with the public sector. Some are pure state programs. I’m sure that many of your witnesses today will have more to say about that.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Sure. So you found that at least the federal program is—I do want to say that the Governor and Senator Feinstein both asked for $100 million for this program. What’s the time frame from your vantage point getting those funds? I mean, how long does that take, and the only reason I ask that is, you know, I’ve asked the question under a state of emergency that, you know, the ability for the State of California itself, whether a $2 billion reserve of getting that same $100 million tomorrow is a lot quicker, faster, because that’s what happens is that we can get those funds as of, you know, 24 hours, versus in essence, waiting for the federal government in a joint request to look at the entire nation it’s going under a heat wave and making resources decisions. What’s your thought on that? Is that something that the—well, I think it’s kind of a leading question. I think the state should do it, but I mean is that something that gives—what sort of assurance does it give the folks that they can turn their air conditioning on in the next heat wave? Does it send a signal out or is this just after the fact?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Well, it’s only the beginning of August, which means that there’s hot weather ahead. If I were worried that there might be another spell of extreme heat in California, I would want do to something to make sure that I was expanding access to air conditioning, whether it’s installing them in buildings like SROs in the lobbies, or whether it’s helping people get this kind of program. But, I think just the real challenge for California in my view now is to begin preparing for the future whether it’s next month or next year.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And you mentioned earlier special policies on single unit occupancies and the City of Sacramento’s discussion that’s occurring now in terms of public spaces. When you say that does it mean that in an apartment complex or some sort of public space that is always, in essence, air conditioned

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in these events people can actually come down to that particular room or what kinds of things are you talking about?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Well, as I said, ideally, we would democratize access to home air conditioning so that everyone had what most people take for granted. That might not be politically or economically realistic. And if that turns out to be the case, then I can’t speak to that. At a minimum, at an absolute minimum, every place that has multiple residents, a single room occupancy hotel, a nursing home—a nursing home you might actually need to have them in individual units.

SENATOR FLOREZ: I’m not sure if it’s a policy in the State of California that every unit has to have a heater in the State of California. I’m not sure if that’s the policy, but I understand that to be the policy, and I was just wondering in those vulnerable areas where we can actually isolate that are actually susceptible to heat waves whether or not that, as Senator Soto said, makes some sense in terms of acquiring some sort of public room or some sort of way if we’re doing it for heating statewide and it’s a requirement in terms of the building, I’m just wondering if that might not be something the state would consider.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: But, my understanding is that you do have those standards for heating in the winter, and that if you were truly worried about these summer heat problems that you would look to do something comparable to protect people in summers as well, especially in places where you know there are real risks.

SENATOR FLOREZ: In a certain zone of, if you will, vulnerability to heat wave.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: You could very easily target places. There has been some problem in the past of, you know, small programs, pilot programs to give away home air conditioners. And then people found that the poorest people were unable to afford the monthly charges for them. So if you provide home air conditioning, you have to have the subsidy that comes with it, otherwise it’s basically useless.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Great. One last question unless other members have questions. In terms of the, you mentioned at the very beginning of your presentation about the alert, you know, the thought process is one that I want to ask every single witness what they think, but you know, I’m not sure what people in California, I’m not talking about government types, not us, or even our staffs or the people that are somewhat surrounded or understand government. I’m talking about the average person. When they hear the Governor or they hear a notice that says we’re in stage two, I’m not sure everybody understands what that means. I mean, I’m just not sure, you know, we’re in stage two, I mean I’ve asked the kind of people in Shafter and they say, that means I turn a couple lights off. I’m not sure, and this is what I’d like to explore during this hearing, what stage two comes other types of health related emergency warnings, as well, because if we’re at that state maybe that kicks in, maybe it doesn’t. I’m not sure. I don’t have an answer to it, but I think there is a different level of preparedness when the Governor of the State of California, the local mayors, whoever, say you know, we’re in a real difficult situation and will be for the next six days. And we’re asking people at heat level five. I know in the valley we do it for fog. There’s various levels, don’t go out, don’t drive, and everybody kind of sees it’s on television. They know what to do, what not to do. And they kind of take it real seriously, but I’m not sure we do that with heat, and I’m wondering is that a different type of warning than your standard ISO, stage two, Governor says conserve power? Is that a different message that you send those residents, the ones we’re worrying about, do they get that or not?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: I think you would want to target the message and specify it to the extent that you can. But--

SENATOR FLOREZ: What are we telling them then? Beyond stage two what gets people to realize that this is a real health related type of emergency that they need to be aware of?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: So there are a few different things. I think you want to target the health message to the people in places that are most vulnerable and you want to say first, just how deadly the heat can be. You want

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to urge residents to find a way to get exposure to air conditioning. You want to say that, you know, you know that many elderly people who live alone are huge consumers of the news. And so they might be suffering and not realizing what’s happening to them. You want to tell people that oftentimes you don’t realize when you’re experiencing heat related illnesses, so even if you feel okay make sure you get yourself in air conditioning or get yourself in a bath, drink a lot of liquids, try to have some kind of company. You want to urge people to check up on family members and neighbors and friends. That won’t be sufficient, but it surely is necessary. You want to use local agencies to do local outreach. So that’s at that one level.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Everything you just mentioned, do you think, you know, I’ll ask the members here, I mean, do you think that occurs when somebody announces we’re in stage two?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: I think the concept stage two means nothing to most Americans.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, I mean, it’s, that’s what I’m asking. As we prepare for and the Governor’s task force convenes, the question is what do those folks understand, you know. That’s the question, I think, that goes along with—I mean, stage twos are always important for the business users, power users and others, but at the end of the day, everything you just mentioned I’m not sure if all that goes with a stage two warning.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Yeah, I think you’re pointing to confusion that exists at both the state and also the federal level. You know, frankly, since September 11th, we’ve invested an enormous amount of our resources collectively, in the project of making ourselves more aware, more prepared. And unfortunately, our communications programs for doing that has basically broken down. We don’t know what stage one means. We don’t know what brown alert or orange alert means. so public communication is essential.

Let me just say one final thing about this warning. I was in New York last week. You may know that residents of Queens or thousands of them lost power for up to five days. We had real problems with our energy grid. And even in Manhattan in the Central business district, police officers came through the

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streets with bullhorns asking that all offices turn their lights down and turn their air conditioners off or at the lowest possible level. I’d never seen that happen before. And there was a great public willingness to do that. I know many offices closed. People went home early. I think that there is tremendous, you know, collective will to prevent disasters at this time in our history. And my guess is that those kinds of requests, of kinds you mentioned before, would be well received.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. Thank you so much. We appreciate you coming out and like to talk to you a little bit after the hearing, as well.

SENATOR DENHAM: (INAUDIBLE) SENATOR FLOREZ: Yes, I’m sorry, Senator.SENATOR DENHAM: You mentioned that you felt the greatest need here

was resources, yet I’m looking at your 12 different items here and it looks like the majority of these almost all of them but one is planning. I mean, it would seem to me that we, obviously, need to do a better job of planning and communication, but that doesn’t necessarily mean throw a pot of money at it.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: I think, though, what I said is that one thing about heat waves is that you can actually prevent suffering and death on the cheap. It actually, compared to other disasters, it’s fairly inexpensive to do that. What I would do is I would throw resources at making sure that the most vulnerable people have access to air conditioning. And I would throw resources and energy into the process of planning carefully. Literally, just having the Governor work with mayors to work with local agencies to declare an alert and take this seriously, or providing large buses to farm workers in the summer to make sure they can get into air conditioning could make a world of difference. So I don’t think that I’m saying this is the kind of planning that requires massive resources, but it does require political will.

SENATOR DENHAM: Any estimation from California’s numbers on what air conditioning for the most vulnerable would be?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: No, I can’t speak to that now.

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SENATOR DENHAM: How about what temperatures you would start asking people to turn those on, would it be a temperature or would it be a rise in temperature?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Heat waves are typically deadly when the temperature is over 80 with some humidity for 48 hours or more. The issue is the humidity levels are part of the issue. There are meteorologists who could speak to this more than I could. We’re not talking about the temperature alone. But, the problem is if you have in the evening during summers, if the temperatures don’t get below 80-some degrees and the humidity stays high as well, then people can literally be trapped in the heat. I mean I would encourage the committee to ask a meteorologist or a health expert who knows more precisely about those temperatures than I do to say when you should issue this kind of alert.

SENATOR DENHAM: But, then there would also be a difference between the different areas of the state based on humidity factors.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Sure. And again, I would urge you to look at your records just to, you know, look at the maps of who has been affected and where they’ve been affected. So if you know you’ve got an area that can get very hot during the day, but that is likely to cool down into the low 70s, 50s, and 60s at night, then you are probably less likely to have big spikes of heat deaths, unless the temperatures just get outrageously extreme, and people are in such suffocating places that they die.

Unfortunately, one of the first things—I should say this, one of the first things that happens in most heat waves is that there’s a report of an infant or a toddler who’s died because the parents have left them in their car. And they, you know, go out to do shopping in the mall on an extremely hot day and close the doors and think that, you know, they’ll be right back. The cars heat up to 150 or 160 degrees within a matter of minutes. So there’s another area where just kind of issuing public warnings to make sure parents understand this can make a big difference.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, any other questions? Resources, I understand Senator Denham’s question as well, are important. I think that’s

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probably why the Governor’s asking the feds to give us a billion for ag and also 100 million for the energy programs. So I’m kind of wondering it’s the question how quickly do we get the resources. When do we get them?

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Next time I talk to the President, I’ll let you know.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Would you? Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you for your testimony.

PROFESSOR KLINENBERG: Thank you very much.SENATOR FLOREZ: I would encourage you also if we could connect you

with the Governor’s task force, as well, that would probably be very helpful. Okay, given that we just ended with the question, what is stage one and

two and three power emergency signifies, we’ll go ahead and have Mr. Mansour, the President and Chief Executive Officer of California ISO. Try to give you a segue there and appreciate. I hope we are still keeping you somewhat on schedule. And we very much appreciate your testimony.

MR. YAKOUT MANSOUR: Thank you very much, sir, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. My name is Yakout Mansour. I’m the President and CEO of California ISO. It is really a pleasure to be here, not just for the event itself, but I really respect and admire real oversight for what you have taken now in the form of this hearing it is real leadership. And I’m really honored to be part of it.

The California ISO for those who don’t know it is a not for profit, public benefit corporation that impartially operates about 80 percent of the state high voltage transmission grid. I do have a written testimony that I forwarded to you and Mr. Chairman, based on the two or three points you mentioned earlier in your opening remarks. I will also supplement it by response to those things.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you.MR. MANSOUR: At the California ISO, since the operation of the grid is

the major task, we do we have some sort of a slogan. Hope for the best but plan for the worst. It is with that in mind that I would like to first provide you an overview of the heat storm and second, the preparedness plan that was in place and implemented to address the needs of California and the West.

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First working with the California Public Utilities Commission and our other partners, we make sure that there are enough resources and grid capacity to handle the most severe single outage in the network under average seasonal demand at the typical conditions without a glitch. This is called the average or the one in two years forecast.

This summer’s assessment was based on forecast for the peak demand based on average one in two temperature of just over 46,000 megawatt. So if this is an average year, the demand was 46,000 megawatt. So what we make sure is that for that 46,000 megawatt under certain conditions that they’re actually extreme in terms of the outages that to do with it, that we would operate the system under the outage of the most significant contingency without a glitch.

Under this scenario or assessment indicated that we have reasonable level of operating reserve of 12 percent and double that if we count for demand response and interruptible programs. And California has great programs that are just beginning and action to move them forward in that respect. In any given hour or any given day, we need to maintain approximately seven percent operating reserve above the actual load being served at all times and at any time.

Second we prepare to operate the system under various levels of extreme from typical conditions. Our expectation is to be able to accommodate moderate variations around the base assumption and minimize the impact under severe conditions. Minimize the impact are key words. So under extreme conditions, our plan, when we say we plan for the worst, of course we hope that there will be no impact. But the whole philosophy and the whole strategy is to minimize that impact volume and/or duration if it happens.

Our assessment indicated that we could handle a demand in excess of up to 48,000 megawatt, close to what is likely to be under extreme temperatures that materialize once every 10 years with limited to no impact on firm load customers. And the recent heat wave, the peak demand of 51,000 megawatt was well above any of the scenarios we assumed in our assessment, but yet, when we say we plan for the worst, we even go beyond that. That is over 12

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percent higher, to just put things in perspective, that load was 12 percent higher than last year’s record. It was six percent higher than the worst case scenario we analyzed in our assessment. And it was 38 percent higher than the peak demand of the 2001 year of the crisis. And represents the typical demand of actually five years ahead. Keep in mind that the net generation added from the 2001 crisis until today is about 8,500 megawatt or 23 percent. So the generation that was added since the 2001 crisis is about 23 percent and during this heat wave we handled load 38 percent higher than what we had in the 2001 crisis.

The California Public Utilities Commission and the investor owned utilities ensure that resources are in place for the average one in two scenario with weighted average temperature of approximately 90 degrees across California. So when we say what temperature, when we say average, what temperature do they plan for? It is 90 degrees. And in most years this amount of resource availability has proved to be sufficient.

Now the adverse forecast or a one in 10 years would bring weighted average temperatures of approximately 102 degrees. As you know all too well, the July heat storm brought with it weighted average temperature across the ISO of between 106 and 110 degrees on various days, something California and the West has not experienced in recent history. The temperatures were higher than anything in the 30-year history of our temperature models. So in spite of all of that, I’m happy to report to you that we met the challenge without a glitch from a great and overall resource portfolio. And actually we handled it with a few hundred megawatts to spare thanks to a well executed preparedness plan which saw tremendous cooperation and collaboration by all entities involved including the citizens of California.

Now the tightly structured and well-executed preparedness plan that we started working on shortly after the conclusion of the last summer, in fact, we started preparing for the next heat wave three hours after the last heat wave, and this week we started preparing for 2007 summer.

SENATOR FLOREZ: How about August?

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MR. MANSOUR: That’s what we _____, yes. Now we have conducted—first and then those are the elements of the preparedness plan that help us to go through. We have conducted California Operator Contingency Training sessions for over 300 operators including, the Commission Federal de Electricidad of Mexico, on various typical and extreme scenarios including even bringing back the network from a blackout to, in minimum time.

Secondly, maximize the availability of resources. And that’s very tight coordination of the generators and transmission outages. That work started very early in the year. We started that work around April. I’m pleased to report to you that in spite of the punishing heat wave which usually have major impact in generating facilities, the generator forced outage rate during the record peak days was at an all time low, thanks to all the preparedness and maintenance and the very good coordination that was done well ahead of time, close to half of what it stood at on average in previous years. So on average we kind of expect 4,000 megawatt of outage because of problems, and that time during the heat wave even though in spite of the punishing heat, we had, we started those days with about 2,000 megawatt outage. Further, when faced with outages during those difficult times, the turnaround time was remarkable and well below previous records. On the control room I was standing and people give me some indication of something that happens and based on our typical experience, that probably going to take two or three days. Interesting enough, in less than 24 hours we are back. We mobilized the staff, they know what they do and they have done it in record time.

Now the thirdly, last year’s Executive Order of the Governor established a minimum level of resource adequacy to all load serving entities of 115 percent of their peak demand which was enforced by the PUC and that worked very well in making reasonable levels of resources available. Daily coordination calls or peak day calls brought together the activities of California control area operators, municipals, IOUs, and the state and federal officials. And Mr. Chairman, you asked first of all before I tell you my statement, first of all I am not appointed by the Governor. I do not belong to either party, but what I’ve given you is the fact.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Oh, you’re really in trouble. MR. MANSOUR: (LAUGHTER) But, I am a public servant. Well before

the summer start, the Governor personally met with me for an extended period of time, wanted to know how prepared are we and more importantly, what can he do to help. We told him how he can help, especially in the message of conservation and he delivered every time we needed it. During the heat wave before even it started, when we had the alert, he met personally with me and during that week contacted me four times and every time he wanted to know from me whether he needed to do anything out of the ordinary. And again, he was actually waiting for the message to come from us.

His office, every day, including today, they contact us for half an hour every morning before we start the day to know if we need anything from them that they can execute. So from our perspective, the Governor has done a great job to help us through this.

Conservation, demand response, interruptible programs and the ISOs Voluntary Load Reduction Program played a very significant role in making it through the tough days. That is something that California really should be proud of. The natural trend of the demand, by the way, on July 24th, was heading toward 52,000 megawatt. Those programs helped contain the peak at 50,270 megawatts. Emergency supply arrangements with neighboring control areas also was coordinated and arranged beforehand.

Although we have plans in place for the coordination of, and the restoration of firm load shed blocks we did not have to implement this, but if things were to go worse than they were, we were prepared for that. And in that respect, I really want to also express my appreciation to the Bonneville Power Admnistration for their efforts in making as much available to us. In fact, they were ready if we were to go on high emergency to actually, I wouldn’t say violate, but to go over the limits of the water release for fishery requirements with court orders to help California under the emergency. So significant ____ were available to California all through that peak period, again and that helped a great deal.

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Overall, on the other side, now this is the things that worked very well. On the other side contribution of the wind resources, these are when we talk about renewables and renewables is a number of, as you know, a number of technologies renewable. The contribution of the wind resources at the time of the peak was less than five percent of the total wind installed capacity. Wind usually whether in cold areas somehow or in hot areas the wind did not blow when you really need it. And it blows when you don’t necessarily need it for peak demand. Fires threatened the major facilities which resulted in close monitoring and sometime rerouting the flow on the grid to minimize the impact should we lose major facilities.

In conclusion, careful and early planning worked well and the industry collaboration under those most difficult circumstances was exceptional. That’s how we got through it and we made it through those difficult days. I would be happy, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, to answer any questions you may have.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you. Members, questions? I have a couple. So everything went perfect, huh?

MR. MANSOUR: Almost.SENATOR FLOREZ: Sounds like everything was just wonderful. Let me

ask you about the transformers that blew. And we’ll start there. Saturday, July 22 was the 9th day of the heat wave and the officials, power officials called for stage one, is that correct? Stage one emergency?

MR. MANSOUR: Correct.SENATOR FLOREZ: And I’m just going to quote the L.A. Times reported

that an official with CA-ISO said, “We absolutely need Californians to conserve and cut back on energy use now to help us manage this very serious condition.” The question I have is, when we say that, is that in essence, encouraging people to turn off air conditioners or what are we saying to folks when we get a statement from the ISO?

MR. MANSOUR: Stage one is the lowest level of emergency, as you know, and as you have indicated. And that is when we know that the reserve might be slightly less than the seven percent I indicated earlier. This is basically

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calling on voluntary programs to help us through. It’s not necessarily cutting off air conditioning, but it is raising the air conditioning temperature to 78 or 80 if you can. If you leave the house, turn it off. You know, just manage it in the way—and that actually, those programs have done real well. When we say stage one, by the way, we know that this is kind of difficult terminology for the average person. We don’t just say stage one and we leave it there. We translate it into number of other public instructions through media. One of them is the--

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, what is a match and then as you’re saying stage one is kind of not too bad.

MR. MANSOUR: Not too bad, but then we translate it into Flex Your Power Now.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, but then your statements from your ISO folks are saying things like cut back on power or the system is going to fail. I mean, that doesn’t sound, that sounds imminent. That doesn’t sound—

MR. MANSOUR: Well, that statement—SENATOR FLOREZ: --you know, ____ like we’re kinda getting there. It

sounds like to most folks who are trying to do the best for California that we’re, in essence, asking them to turn down their air conditioning, to minimize electricity use, and the same time we’re worried about vulnerable populations that don’t understand what stage two means, but yet a statement like that might signify to them that, you know, I need to go from three on my window air conditioning unit to one. And that might make all the difference. So if it’s not that of a dangerous point, then why would we be issuing that sort of, or why would your spokesperson be issuing that type of statement?

MR. MANSOUR: Well, actually, all the calls for conservation is not associated only for stage one when we know we’re in a critical situation through the week, we make that call and it’s not just associated with stage one. It is just engineering mindset for everyone try to conserve as much as they can. We are not, we do never ask people to go beyond their tolerance. We say depending on your tolerance just to be, you know, mindful of the fact that we do have a challenging situation.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, what’s the statement from the ISO that says we’re really at a point where you have to really turn it down? What statement is that, then? Is it help? What’s more imminent, I mean, what is it then if that’s stage one, what’s the statement coming from your office.

MR. MANSOUR: Well, as I said, we translate the stage one and stage two and all of those into other program which is the people can understand. Flex Your Power Now is a program.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, but, I’m, just ask a question in terms of what is the statement, then, coming from your department when we hit that very, very critical stage of literally stage two rolling blackout. What is the statement?

MR. MANSOUR: When we get beyond the stage two, stage two, by the way, also, stage two is a stage by which we call upon the major customers who are paid to curtail when we need them. So that is a stage two.

SENATOR FLOREZ: So we ask the little guy first to, we alarm them and tell them to turn off or to power down in stage one, but stage two is when we get real serious and tell the big users—

MR. MANSOUR: We interrupt them altogether. It is not—SENATOR FLOREZ: Why wouldn’t it be the opposite? Given heat waves,

given the ability to keep people cool, why wouldn’t we tell the big users first to power down, get to a point where we can then ask people if we needed that extra bit of juice to keep their air conditioning going if it meant saving a life. Why is one in essence, the little guy, and the second is the big users?

MR. MANSOUR: Well, first, for the little guy we’re not telling the little guy don’t stay cool. All we say be alert—

SENATOR FLOREZ: Here’s what you said. We absolutely need Californians to conserve and cut back on energy use now to help us manage this very serious condition. That’s a statement from your organization. And another quote from your organization, cut back on power or the system’s going to fail. Sounds pretty, that sounds—

MR. MANSOUR: We did not, yeah, we did not say that in stage one, sir. We did that when we were approaching the 50,000 and beyond. So that was when we really pushing the system way beyond—

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SENATOR FLOREZ: ____ July 22, the ninth day of the heat wave—MR. MANSOUR: And the stage—SENATOR FLOREZ: --you called for a stage one power emergency. Let

me ask you—let’s go beyond that. Let me ask a question. When we do get to a point where we’re asking our big users to cut back, curtail, we already told folks to cut back from their own use as we’re in an imminent situation, at what—and we’re in a heat wave, I guess the question I have is do we make that statement and then does the Governor come in at some point and say, and we’re also opening cooling centers or are we just kind of make the statement and that’s it?

MR. MANSOUR: Well, the stage one and stage two are only related to the grid. It does not—

SENATOR FLOREZ: How does it relate to the Governor opening cooling centers? Because you’re telling people to power down. You’re in essence, getting them to a point where they may not be turning their air conditioners off, and then is there a place for those people to go given that you’ve asked that?

MR. MANSOUR: Well, again, we’re not asking people to cut air conditioner off. We’re asking people to raise the temperature of their air conditioner to 78. If they’re not in the room, turning the lights off, and turn the light on when you are in the room. We're saying do not turn your, you know, your washer and dryer at the time of the peak. That’s what we’re asking people to do. These are not life threatening.

SENATOR FLOREZ: How do they know that?MR. MANSOUR: Sir.SENATOR FLOREZ: You’re telling people that specifically?MR. MANSOUR: Yes. That’s what we do. When you say when you look

at the Flex Your Power program, the power alert.SENATOR FLOREZ: How do people know what the Flex Your Power

program is? Let’s start _____.MR. MANSOUR: Well, there’s a number of things. The media actually

was a good partner in all of this. The media, in fact, through that whole period all cameras of TV stations, those people have actually built good relations with

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us. They were actually in the control room all the time apprising people where the state is and be telling them what they’re supposed to do.

SENATOR FLOREZ: I gotcha. Are you confident if you and I went to the local Target parking lot, you told people to Flex Your Power, they would know exactly what to do?

MR. MANSOUR: You know, if I have 10-15 percent or even 20 percent of people who understand what that is, that is for us enough. We’re not necessarily—this is the kind of a you know, amount of 2,000 megawatts or so which represents about four percent of the total load. If I have 15 or 20 percent of the people who understand, then that’s enough for me.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay.MR. MANSOUR: So not counting necessarily on a 100 percent to do it.

The more, the better, but 15-20 percent actually ___ even that is good enough.SENATOR FLOREZ: And there were some transformers that did blow

during this, is that correct?MR. MANSOUR: These are distribution transformers and I think you

have a panel later on with the utilities. Those are distribution transformers that just did not take the heat.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Does that add to the emergency situation or not, from your perspective?

MR. MANSOUR: That is not tied to our emergency, to the grid emergency. It’s a different thing.

SENATOR FLOREZ: You monitor that?MR. MANSOUR: We were aware of it, but the action is totally local at the

utilities level.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Any questions, members? Okay, thank you

very much. Appreciate it.MR. MANSOUR: Thank you.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Alright, if we could now get to the, I think the

most important part of the hearing is to maybe have the folks from the Administration come up. You can come up as a panel that would be great. Ann Boynton, Undersecretary, Department of Health and Human Services; A.J. Yates,

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Undersecretary, Department of Food and Ag; Mr. Mark Horton, State Public Health Officer, Department of Health Services; and Paul Jacks, Deputy Director, Response Recovery Division, the Office of Emergency Services.

Okay, thank you. I’m not sure how we want to proceed from an individual perspective, but what I’ll do is try to direct questions to each division, but feel free to jump in. And in other words don’t, if you could just identify yourself for the record, that would be helpful for the transcript.

First and foremost, let me say thank you. And as I mentioned earlier, thanks to the Governor for creating the task force. I think it’s going to be very helpful. But, let me just start off with a threshold question for you and it’s the question I think that is the reason we’re here. And that is, does the State of California have an emergency plan that addresses heat related natural disasters? It’s the threshold question.

MR. PAUL JACKS: We do not have a specific heat plan at this point in time. We are—

SENATOR FLOREZ: Could you identify yourself for the record?MR. JACKS: Oh, sorry. My name is Paul Jacks. I’m the Deputy Director

with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. I’m responsible for response and recovery operations for that office. I’d like to start by saying that State of California has a very good multi-hazard plan, the California State Emergency Operations Plan. That said, we do not at this time, have a contingency plan for heat emergency. We are in fact, as part of the task force, developing a specific contingency plan for heat emergency as part of that task force activity.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. And when did the task force start?MS. ANN BOYNTON: Ann Boynton, Undersecretary, Health and Human

Service Agency. The Governor asked that Health and Human Services jointly with OES convene that task force last week. We have subcommittee meetings this week. The full task force will again convene next week. Our primary focus is in four major areas in the subgroups looking at the specific question of heat triggers and whether that is, how does that unfold, is that a local role, is that a state role? How do we interplay between them? How’s the relationship work there?

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SENATOR FLOREZ: So you’ve answered then maybe then my second question. We don’t have an emergency plan for heat related natural disasters, that’s one thing that’s clear. The other is the question I had is how about the effects of heat on the health and welfare of Californians, and you’re saying that is part and parcel of—

MS. BOYNTON: Of the task force. Yes, the other subcommittees that we are convening are looking specifically at information dissemination. One of the things that we’ve found as Senator Denham referenced that earlier, the Labor and Work Force Development in conjunction with the county agriculture commissioners launched a very aggressive campaign relative to heat regulations, particularly for outdoor workers. Thousands of informational items were distributed, and at this point, we are very fortunate that the outcome of that is that although we did lose lives, nine of the deaths that we know of so far relative to the, relative to the heat wave are outdoor workers. That means that informational campaign works.

SENATOR FLOREZ: No, no, I—MS. BOYNTON: And we’re going to leverage that, this part of it.SENATOR FLOREZ: In all fairness, when the Governor came to the

Valley to announce that program, that program had been in place from a temporary point of view for a year. We were happy that he made it permanent—

MS. BOYNTON: Last year, from August is when the Governor put in the emergency regulations. And the agency spent the last year promulgating that and educating. It’s the education piece that we need to expand.

SENATOR FLOREZ: But, that was not easy to get the Administration to make them permanent. It was not an easy—I just want, for the record, make sure it was not as easy as simply everyone saying we’re going to keep these great heat regs in place and obviously that was negotiated between the Governor and the United Farm Workers last summer. So I’m very thankful that that occurred, but I guess the question I have for the panel is that given that we didn’t have an emergency plan, given that we’re now talking about the effects of heat on everyday Californians, if we didn’t have any protocols in place for this

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heat wave, we didn’t have a plan, how did we function under this heat wave? I mean, at the end of the day, without any protocols, how did we function through this particular disaster?

MR. JACKS: I’d like to say I think that, you know, what, you know, you were singling out a heat plan. We don’t have a plan for, a specific plan for flood, a specific plan for earthquake, whatever. We have a state emergency plan which we feel, you know, is a solid, multi-hazard type of plan. Did it cover all the bases in terms of this heat emergency, you know? Probably not, which is one reason why we’re working on the contingency plan at this point in time. I don’t want anybody, you know, in terms of this committee or whatever, thinking that we have no protocols in place or whatever. Almost immediately, you know, back in the first week in July we started, you know, we were issuing warnings on heat and so forth. We were also, you know, initiating conference calls, you know, with our operational areas, counties. Counties were communicating with the cities and so forth, so there’s a whole system there that was kicked into gear early in mid July.

If I could also, I want to mention this is Dr. Mark Horton—SENATOR FLOREZ: Please mention your name for the record, so we can

get it on ____.DR. MARK HORTON: I’m Dr. Mark Horton. I’m the State Public Health

Officer and a chief deputy within the Department of Health Services. We’re responsible for one particular area and that is licensed nursing homes and other long term care facilities. Several steps that we took in anticipation of this was to send a letter out to all nursing homes alerting them to the possible ill health effects of the heat wave and the steps that they need to be taken within those residential facilities. As the heat wave came on through each one of our district offices we, by telephone, contacted through the heat wave every residential facility in the state. That represented over 2,200 residential facilities housing over 150,000 frail elderly individuals to monitor the impact of the heat wave on the health of the residents, as well as to offer assistance in steps they needed to take to maintain their protection throughout.

The second step that we did in conjunction—

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SENATOR FLOREZ: When did that letter go out?DR. HORTON: The letter went out in June.SENATOR FLOREZ: June.DR. HORTON: Right. SENATOR FLOREZ: What did the letter basically say?DR. HORTON: It basically alerted nursing homes to the danger of a heat

wave and reminded them of the specific steps they need to be taking specifically to provide hydration, to provide adequate monitoring of the residents, and to provide fans and other air moving devices to ensure that they were protected.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Let me ask these follow up questions for the record or transcript. So in other words at this point in time we’re developing a plan.

MS. BOYNTON: Yes, the task force is working.SENATOR FLOREZ: We’re developing protocols for heat related natural

disasters. That, we’re doing. Okay. MS. BOYNTON: Yes.SENATOR FLOREZ: I guess the question and going back to OES’s

comment, you know, we had a protocol and kind of, it’s kind of a, you know, bits for tsunamis and floods and fires. Apparently we have these. We operate under, if you will, some sort of overall protocol. But, I guess the question I have is what’s the difference given this is now over, at least temporarily in terms of the heat wave, but what is the difference from OES’s perspective of an earthquake versus a health threat, an epidemic that kills people for example, but doesn’t necessarily cause any sort of property damage--protocols. How do they work, I mean, you know, everything you mentioned there’s been a discussion about this being structural types of emergencies that the Governor weighs in on, but this is kind of like a health epidemic. It’s kind of like if 160 people died from bird flu or something in California. You going to operate any differently then in terms of you mentioned one protocol and all of those things have in common structural, but this wasn’t really structural. This was a heat related incident that was a slow killer as has been mentioned by our professor early on.

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MR. JACKS: Once again, Paul Jacks from OES. I think that the thing that concerns me most is that it’s a more slowly developing situation. I won’t, I don’t want to speak to the public health aspects. I think we have far more qualified people on this panel to speak to that. But, from an emergency management perspective, you know, it’s in a sense, it’s much easier to deal, you know, with something as suddenness of fear as an earthquake or a flood. Or even a hurricane which gives some warning. This is a little bit different. It’s more slowly developing in a sense. And quite frankly, it has more social aspects. All disasters have social aspects, but this, you know, I think very largely is a kind of a social disaster. And I think we have to look at that a little bit different. Most of our stuff is geared, quite frankly, towards that kind of sudden severe impact event. So, I think that does warrant certain—

SENATOR FLOREZ: One of your, I guess Ronnie Java, spokesperson for your department was quoted as saying, quote: this extreme heat was an act of nature like an earthquake or a fire, and I guess the question I have is did your office respond to this heat wave with the same energy that we would have operated under the same fire or earthquake, given that that was the comment coming from the Department, did we operate in the same mode from your vantage point, or are heat waves, as you mentioned, some sort of prolonged development that require a different protocol?

MR. JACKS: I believe that we did act as if we were involved in any other type of disaster event. Does that mean that all the bases are covered in the same way? No, I don’t think so.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Did you ever issue an extreme heat warning, OES?MR. JACKS: We issued about 57 warnings from the National Weather

Service beginning on July 12. And we also issued about 76 heat advisory statements from NWS, as well. Those went through our CLETS system, our law enforcement communications system, and also through our emergency digital information system.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, and is that part of your responsibility?MR. JACKS: Issuing those warnings? Those types of warnings?

Absolutely.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: And in terms of an extreme heat warning, what does that mean in terms of the message to the public? You know, we had our professor talk about different messages given, kind of the social context of this. How was that communicated? Is it stage two, we’re about to lose power, or is it more of a health-related message coming from OES? It’s like really important, I think, for the task force to consider this as something different.

MR. JACKS: I can’t necessarily link it to the power type of, you know—SENATOR FLOREZ: No, was it power lecture—MR. JACKS: There were power warnings and there were also, you know,

precautions, you know, that people should be taking because of the extreme heat. In fact, our director, Henry Renteria, and also Dr. Horton did joint statements to that effect, both addressing the conservation side and also the public health side.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. Okay. Let me to go the emergency declaration, because it’s been a point of contention, obviously, in terms of the Governor calling one, not calling one, needing to call one, not needing to call one. In your opinion, what does an emergency declaration signify to you as OES?

MR. JACKS: As OES, that’s a very good question. You know, a state of emergency proclamation, you know, in our thinking is something that results in specific authority being given or a specific resource being provided. Typically we would not be recommending a state of emergency unless there’s something specific that is going to be provided as a result of that action. It’s not done for emotional reasons or ceremonial reasons. It’s done for very specific, you know, usually resource needs.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, so like people are running out of space on gurneys or there’s emergency rooms that are closed or people need additional resources.

MR. JACKS: It could be, but oftentimes those kinds of things can in fact, be take care of at the local level under their local authorities. And so you have to look at the system here. The system is generally built on a local emergency

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occurring first, and then a state emergency coming in to supplement those local efforts.

SENATOR FLOREZ: The Governor declared a state of emergency for levees. Did the local governments request him to do that, as you just mentioned? What makes that different?

UNIDENTIFIED: (INAUDIBLE) SENATOR FLOREZ: I know. Did the locals, though, you just mentioned

your typically the locals request that.MR. JACKS: I said typically and in certain cases because of the severity

of the situation, there may in fact be a Governor’s action taken. SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, so the Governor doesn’t necessarily have to

wait for the locals to—MR. JACKS: No, and I would never say that. The Governor does what the

Governor has to doSENATOR FLOREZ: If the Governor wanted to declare a state of

emergency as he did for the levees he could have done it even if local government felt that it didn’t—

MR. JACKS: But, once again, the Governor did that specifically to make available certain assistance.

SENATOR FLOREZ: No, no, no, I understand. I'm just trying to get, I just want to make sure for the record we’re clear that in either way, the Governor can wait for local government or he, himself can act, is that correct?

MR. JACKS: Absolutely. That’s correct.SENATOR FLOREZ: Let me ask you, what does an emergency

declaration actually signify from your vantage point, all of you, to the public? I mean, when we say an emergency declaration is called, is it any different, you know, is it any different than any other type of thing that we do from an OES perspective? Does it signify anything different to the general public in terms of a state of emergency being called by the Governor as opposed to what ISO told us, stage two, we’re in it. I mean, your, I appreciate your comments on that point.

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MS. BOYNTON: I think that clearly any time a state of emergency is declared at the local level or regional or at the state level, people have a reaction to that declaration.

SENATOR FLOREZ: What kind of reaction do they normally have?MS. BOYNTON: I think it depends on the situation. I think in some

instances a declaration of an emergency can be unnecessarily alarmist and cause reactions with the general public that will be adverse to the conditions that we are trying to address. And so we focused on providing information in a way that would help the locals and help our vulnerable populations rather than alarming them into other circumstances.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, so with 164 deaths, do the alarmists or overreaction by folks would have meant that you may have turned your air conditioner on, drink too much water, hydrated, found other places to keep cool. I mean is that an overreaction or is that, in essence, them protecting themselves from a very dangerous situation? What’s an overreaction in the heat related instance?

MS. BOYNTON: If, so for example, if an emergency declaration had been declared that focused only on keeping cool, those kinds of things, and I would defer, of course, to CA-ISO and the utilities on this, but a serious spike would have, could have caused massive failures across the state which would have resulted in more deaths. And the state—

SENATOR FLOREZ: And failures, how?MS. BOYNTON: Massive failures to the power grid. And so 1, again, I

would defer, I mean, that’s sort of the—SENATOR FLOREZ: But, the Governor couldn’t have made their prisons

go on generators, the Governor couldn’t have powered down, changed the work day, allowed state governments to save that power for those particular vulnerable populations so they could turn the air conditioning on?

MS. BOYNTON: We have tremendous—SENATOR FLOREZ: I was just wondering, I mean, there are tremendous

powers in the emergency declarations. The Governor has the power, police power, he can suspend statutes, he can commandeer private property, he can

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amend, rescind state orders, regulations, he can utilize state personnel. He can give equipment and facilities. He can lastly, make any expenditures from any fund legally available, it’s all though the codes. And so given all of those immense powers and you know, I’m just kind of wondering, did he avail himself of all of those before we—

MS. BOYNTON: Again, I would defer to CA-ISO or the utilities. Our, the research that we have seen, and Paul can correct me if I’m wrong, for example, changing work days. There aren’t documented studies that say sending everybody home is the answer. They will then turn on their air conditioners, they will do all of those things where at least there’s a balance of power and we can predict what they will do.

SENATOR FLOREZ: How about power in the prisons?MS. BOYNTON: I don’t know the status, frankly, of the emergency

generator capacity of the prisons.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Do you, let me just get to the threshold

question. Do you agree that the Governor’s given enormous powers through the declaration of emergency?

MS. BOYNTON: Certainly.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Does he have more power than local

governments, mayors, and board of supervisors who may have to act quickly given those emergency powers?

MR. JACKS: I don’t know that I would say he has more powers. In fact, in many ways his powers are designed to supplement those that occur at the local level.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, so it kind of generates from that balance, is that correct? Senator Soto, yes, sorry.

SENATOR SOTO: When you begin to realize that there is an impending danger, do you in any way announce it to your constituents or the people, local governments, in some way say be aware that there is a possibility that so and so could happen and make them aware to be on the lookout or at least prepare to issue something to the constituents?

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MS. BOYNTON: Yeah, one of the, for example, the Department of Social Services runs the In Home Supportive Services program--375,000 of the state’s most vulnerable populations receive these services. The director of the Department of Social Services convened a call with the county welfare directors, asked them to redouble their efforts to ensure that these most vulnerable folks had been contacted very, very recently, not I talked to them on Monday and they’re fine. But, recontact them and make sure they’re okay, and provided the mechanism so that they could charge, they could bill, they could receive reimbursement for those activities.

SENATOR SOTO: Is there any follow up done so to ensure that they’ve been contacted?

MS. BOYNTON: Yes, actually we had them reporting back to us on the activities that they—the number of people that they contacted and what the outcomes of those calls were.

SENATOR SOTO: Do you by any chance make a random call to some residents to see that they did in fact contact you? Do you make kind of a random research?

MS. BOYNTON: To check up on what the counties had done and what the counties had reported to us? We have not, to my knowledge, done that.

SENATOR SOTO: Seems to me that it would be a probably a way to find out if that’s being done for sure is to do random calls to check to see if they’ve been notified and have somebody in charge of that to do that, because what if they tell you one thing and another is done? Not that I think that they would do that, but just in case, so that you could really have a follow up procedure.

MS. BOYNTON: We can certainly evaluate that. We trust our county partners. We depend on them every day. We know the integrity of the people who provide these services, both through the county welfare directors and the public health officers and the IHSS workers who this is their life and soul, and to suspect that they’re not taking care of their clients would, is not something—we trust that they are doing the best for their clients.

SENATOR SOTO: It isn’t so much that you don’t trust them, I think it’s just to ensure that it is being done so that—I mean, what if for some reason

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somebody didn’t follow up, and it was their, through no fault of theirs, but they just absolutely didn’t and something happened and they didn’t do it. It’s just another precautionary step.

DR. HORTON: This is Dr. Horton. Along with the efforts through IHSS, I directed local heath departments to work with their county welfare agencies to mobilize resources necessary to knock on the doors of all SROs in their communities through our joint emergency operations center that we were then in daily contact with local jurisdictions to get follow up on how effectively they were doing that and to ask them if they needed additional resources from the state to make that happen. So we were very proactive.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, ____ you just hit on something. You said the joint emergency operations you were asking people they need additional resources. What resources? Who empowers you to give resources from the State of California to do that?

DR. HORTON: We have the availability, for example, we have multiple district offices throughout the state, such that if in a given jurisdiction would have told us saying that we need to mobilize some additional workers to go out and knock on doors, we were ready to provide—we had identified workers in local areas that could have been made available to local jurisdictions to help them and assist them.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And everything you just said, I think both of you had just mentioned earlier ___ really didn’t, I mean everything you just mentioned in terms of what we were doing, the emergency aspect of calling folks, that really didn’t address any physical damage then, did it? In other words, I think OES just said we’re in operative mode when it has to deal with physical damage, but in essence, you were doing non-physical damage.

MS. BOYNTON: Checking on the health and well-being, right, of our residents.

SENATOR FLOREZ: I want to make sure there’s a real strong message for the Administration during this crisis that really, this is only dealing with structural issues. I mean when you call for a state of emergency, it’s really for structural.

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MR. JACKS: No.MS. BOYNTON: I don’t believe that that’s true. SENATOR FLOREZ: It’s not structural. MR. JACKS: No, no, absolutely not. And once again, you know, to build

upon what Undersecretary Boynton and Dr. Horton were saying, I mean, at the same time they’re communicating and reaching out to their, you know, groups, you know, we were doing the same thing with emergency managers asking once again, do you need any help? Is there anything out there that we need to be aware of? So, you know, I don’t want there to be an impression that we’re just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. And if the phone doesn’t ring we don’t do anything. That’s not the way the system works.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, Senator Romero and then Senator Denham.SENATOR GLORIA ROMERO: Thank you, and let me commend the chair

of the committee for calling this special hearing. I think quite frankly we did wait for the phone to ring. I think we did wait and taking a look at the correspondence from the chair going back to July, the height of this. And what I would like is to get a listing of every single name who suffered from these heat related, preventable, I believe, preventable deaths. This is a tragedy. The vast majority of them occurring, of course, in Senator Florez’s district and that’s why he’s taking the leadership on this issue. But, with all due respect, I think you did wait for the phone to ring. Quite frankly, you waited for the letters to be written before finally a task force created on this. But, it shouldn’t have been, it couldn’t have been.

Granted, this has happened across the nation. I would like to find out, Mr. Chair, also what did other states do, Illinois, New York, etcetera? Maybe California might take a look at some of those policies to have emulated it. But, it seems, it seems that there are some preventive steps that could have been taken. We were all, we all look at the Power Flex, commercials that are run at a time unprecedented from Northern to Southern California where people were dying, with the Fresno morgue being overrun. If that is not an emergency, what is?

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And I almost wanted to ask you failed to declare a state of emergency what would it have taken for it to be an emergency? When Senator Florez indicated the number of deaths, 170, I believe, you know, I flew up on Southwest Airlines this morning. That was about what, 80 people? If two Southwest Airplanes had crashed coming up today, you don’t think all of a sudden this would have been on CNN, that there would have been a demand for investigation of what happened to those two planes that went down?

So these are people. They’re farmworkers, they’re seniors, they’re elderly, they’re young people, as well. I just would like to hear from you what, at some point, Mr. Chair, when you believe it’s relevant for this, what would it have taken to declare a state of emergency and with a lot of weeks left still in summer, what are we doing to be ready to read the cues to be prepared?

Finally, if I might just add on the prison issue absolutely we could look at it, but also prisons are no air conditioned, generated. I toured Chico State Prison just last week. It is a sweltering mess. So we’ve got to be cautious in terms of what generators we go back on, but clearly there it seems that there would have been steps had you been observant to this. And I think, too, compassion. That’s what I think was lacking. Leadership and that old, just that old fashioned from the heart compassion that people were dying in unprecedented numbers and it took Senator Florez finally to say, come on Mr. Governor, come on State of California. Step up to the plate. What does it take to declare a state of emergency?

SENATOR FLOREZ: And let me follow up from Senator Romero. Would it have hurt the Administration to call for a state of emergency? Would it have hurt the ability of the Administration to act if we had indeed had called for a state of emergency? I think that’s really the secondary question ____. Maybe we can get an answer from you folks on that. I mean would it have hurt anything to call for a state of emergency? Would it have somehow hampered our efforts?

MR. JACKS: This is Paul Jacks, again. I guess the corollary to that question would be what would it specifically have done that we did not do?

SENATOR FLOREZ: You really want to go through that?

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MR. JACKS: Not necessarily. (LAUGHTER) SENATOR FLOREZ: That’s why you guys have a task force, right.

Actually, you’re going to go through that. But, I’m just saying—MR. JACKS: We are learning from the event.SENATOR FLOREZ: The question is what—we’re all learning through

this, but the question is would it have hurt, as Senator Romero’s issue, and in essence, would it have gotten in the way of efforts, or would it have provided more good than less? I guess that is the fundamental question, it’s a question that we’ll probably ponder, because it’s after the fact, but it’s a question I think that stands in my mind. I want to move on past the question of the call for this, but I do want to ask one follow up question. The account for economic uncertainty—can you tell me what that is used for and how much is in it and would it in essence, I mean, anybody?

(INAUDIBLE) MS. BOYNTON: I don’t k now the answer to that.SENATOR FLOREZ: Anybody? Okay, who acts as the account for

economic uncertainty? MS. BOYNTON: It’s not an account I’m familiar with. It’s a question that

I would have to ask the Department of Finance.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, you’re scaring me, because the emergency

account, you’re all emergency people here, and I think ultimately if the Governor wants access to that, I think it’s somewhere near two billion. And I’m wondering at the end of the day when we get through the year with a $2 billion account or a billion plus or something of that sort, do we feel any better that we got through this by not pushing resources down and kept our reserve intact? Or, I mean, I thought that’s what it was there for.

MS. BOYNTON: We offered all assistance to the locals. We received very limited requests. We were ready to deploy the National Guard. We were ready to redirect the California Conservation Corp. We were ready with California Service Corp. Thousands of state staff were diverted from standard practice, routine activities to man the phones, to do visits, to ensure that we were doing everything that we could at the state level to provide the assistance.

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We were not pushing money out, we did not respond because we didn’t have access to money. We responded and we were ready to deploy whatever resources were necessary and we did so.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, I guess the question that I have is at least as the, I’m not even going to say the Governor. The Administration in general, I mean, we’re supposed to, and that’s the reason we’re here today, from a coordinated effort, from a bird’s view of this, I’m not sure if the mayor of Bakersfield knows the damage that is occurring in the City of Stockton. I’m not sure that the Sacramento mayor knows what’s happening in the City of Dinuba. I mean, at the end of the day, someone has to be looking over the entire situation and making a deployment decision that individual mayors themselves, looking at their cities cannot make. And I guess the question simply is since you’re the folks who are monitoring the grid and looking at the statewide situation, coordinating, having the emergency centers and everything you just mentioned, I mean, who would be best to say that we make that decision like the Governor made on the levees to call for a state of emergency even without local government asking for it, because there was a precedent for that. I mean are we going to say that in every one of these emergencies we’re going to wait for enough cities and counties to ask for that? Kings County asked for a state of emergency in their resolution and no one’s come to their rescue. Just kind of wondering isn’t as though no one has asked.

MR. JACKS: Once again, this is Paul Jacks, it’s not an issue that, you know, the Governor does not have to have a local government ask him to take that action. Okay, I think we’ve established that. And once again, the action is taken to provide certain resources. In the case of the levees, it was to, you know, specifically deal with that problem to provide resources for that problem that were available to be provided for that problem. So, you know, I just, you know, in a sense, I think that what’s being ignored here perhaps is the fact that the state did take a lot of actions. That there were a lot of things done by the agencies that had authorities, you know, to do so. And those actions don’t require a state of emergency.

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If there had been actions that required a state of emergency, then we would have taken it.

DR. HORTON: This is Dr. Horton to supplement that. Once again, I want to refer to the fact that we activated our joint emergency operations center. That’s run in conjunction with the emergency medical services authority with the explicit purpose of making daily contact with local jurisdictions to monitor the health impact, to monitor activities that were occurring, and specifically to make ourselves available to them. And with all due respect, I do want to disagree with Senator Romero’s characterization of lack of compassion. I would once again, want to refer to the activities of our Licensing and Certification. I’m very proud. I would say they’re not just compassionate, they are passionate about the health and welfare of the residents in those facilities. And at the very earliest indication that there was a problem, were on the phone monitoring the situation at every one of the nursing homes around the county, around the state. So I want to make on the record to say that I think state employees are compassionate, and in some cases, passionate about the health of their constituents.

SENATOR FLOREZ: If they’re deployed. DR. HORTON: Absolutely.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Senator Denham and then _____.SENATOR DENHAM: Several different counties obviously declared a

state of emergency. How many of those counties requested the state to do so?MR. JACKS: This is Paul Jacks, again. Not one. Kings County in their

proclamation and we clarified it with them, because I got on the phone with them. They told us they were not requesting this state of emergency proclamation by the Governor. They were only requesting the Governor seek, you know, assistance from the USDA. So there were no specific requests. Most of the local proclamations we received were as a result of the rendering issues. They needed to put cows in the ground, because they couldn’t take them to the rendering plants. We had two local proclamations that we received in Stanislaus County, and I think Kings County that referenced public health. The rest of the locals that we received did not. And you must remember, there were, I think, 20

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counties or 21 counties that had deaths, and so there was only eight counties out of those 20 or 21 counties that actually even took the action of making a local proclamation.

SENATOR DENHAM: So, from the standpoint of the counties, they were telling you, here’s our situation. This is what we’re doing and developing maybe a better communication line, but not requesting anything at the time.

MR. JACKS: That’s correct.SENATOR DENHAM: And that’s what I would say from my counties, as

well. I mean, I was very involved and was involved with the Governor very early on. He responded. I felt very early coming down to each of those counties as well as the surrounding counties. And I think that you did a very good job of responding and getting all of the local governments together.

I think as far as the task force has gone, being put together, I think for obviously reasons, no Governor in the past has worked on preventative measures in this nature. There was obviously some, you know, after the fact, you can always look at any disaster and say there were things we could have done better to prevent some of these situations. But as far as responding to, I thought there was some excellent things that happened in my district.

The question I would have is if the state would have declared an emergency at the time, what would that have done?

MR. JACKS: We’ve asked ourselves that question over and over again, and we are not aware of anything substantive that would have resulted from that proclamation that we did not do. State agencies were in fact, mobilized. We were coordinating with local governments. Local governments were opening up cooling centers and cooling stations. Media messages were going out. I think, you know, we can safely say that there was a lot of mobilization that occurred without there being a proclamation at the local level or at the state level.

SENATOR DENHAM: And after the fact, were any of the, did any of the counties express that there were needs that were unmet as far as personnel and responding to any of the different tragedies?

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MR. JACKS: We have had, as I mentioned before, conference calls with pretty much all the counties that were in the hot zone. We have not been made aware of any unmet needs that they had that they needed state support on.

MR. A. J. YATES: Senator Denham, with regards to agriculture, four days prior to this heat wave, Fresno County and Kings County had local ask the local emergencies which enabled the Department of Agriculture along with CalEPA to serve their needs and enable them to deal with the tremendous loss they were having in cattle. We had a rendering plant go down in Fresno County which created a backlog. We needed to go to other sources of disposal. We were able to open some landfill in Fresno County. We were then able also to open one in Kings County. Within a week, we had four other counties that declared local emergencies that enabled us to deal with Tulare and counties to the north.

We ran into, as the heat wave kicked in then and the death toll of animals began to rise, we were able to in working with CalEPA and the Water and Air Board, put guidelines into place that helped them dispose of the animals. The guidelines were first we would like you to go to a rendering plant. Second, a land fill. Composting would be third, and last and least would be burial and burial in ground that would not be irrigated and in some counties that was not enacted, because of the closeness to ground water.

So a state of emergency would have been no benefit to agriculture here. Our ag commissioners who we work very closely with were on top of this statewide. We talked to them almost daily and then we pulled in USDA locally. The secretary was asked by the Governor to go to Washington, D.C. The aid to agriculture will come from federal government and we have that process moving. We have been in constant contact with USDA since prior to this emergency taking place.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Mr. Yates, let me ask you a quick follow up to that. Everyone was on top of the ag perspective. We had a thousand cows in Kern County that will be on the hourly requirement in terms of being moved maybe to the rendering plant or put into the county dump. If we’re so on top of it, then why were they way past regulation in terms of 72 hours?

MR. A.J. YATES: Well, Kern County—

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SENATOR FLOREZ: We were well prepared for. We knew it was going to happen. Then why, in essence, were a thousand cows rotting well beyond where they should have been?

MR. YATES: Kern County did not declare an emergency until almost the end of the heat wave. They were depending on Stanislaus County to address their needs. Stanislaus County finally became overrun by the fact that we also had a poultry problem. According to the industry, we lost a million birds in this. And so Stanislaus County could no longer handle Kern County’s situation. Kern County did finally declare a local emergency which enabled them to deal with their problems locally.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And that signifies that we were prepared well beyond, well before the heat wave?

MR. YATES: We had waived the regulations that needed to be waived to where the industry could deal with this in a way to dispose of animals where there wouldn’t be a danger to public health.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And the locals didn’t see the problem in Kern, because you did. I mean, from a statewide perspective, you saw that all happening. You just mentioned it. And so why would we depend on the locals to make that declaration without seeing the big picture and why wouldn’t we call that from the state perspective?

MR. YATES: Their problems were being addressed. They didn’t see that they needed to open up their landfills. We had Kettleman City open which was taking theirs. That’s in Kings County as you well know. And—

SENATOR FLOREZ: I gotcha. Let me ask a question. You mentioned and Senator Denham also mentioned that we could have—nothing with a state of emergency could have helped out in this situation, and I’m not going to mention the fact that we, you know—were all of our cooling centers open 24 hours?

MR. JACKS: I don’t believe all cooling centers were open 24 hours.SENATOR FLOREZ: Could that have been done better?MR. JACKS: I’m not so sure that would have required a state of

emergency to be done.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Let me ask you a question—MR. JACKS: I mean, that’s under local control pretty much, or the

utilities also ran a lot of the cooling centers.SENATOR FLOREZ: How about utilities? The Governor and Senator

Feinstein asking for 100 million now after the fact—MR. JACKS: For LIHEAP? SENATOR FLOREZ: If the Governor decided that this was going to be a

real heavy period and the Administration sought to provide assurances to residents that their electricity bill that we were going to tap our account for economic uncertainty to make sure that they kept those air conditioners, could they have done that?

MR. JACKS: I’m not an expert on the account for economic uncertainties, a special fund for economic uncertainties. I will say this though, I don’t believe that a state of emergency gives the Governor carte blanche to spend money. Otherwise, he’d probably do that all the time. Or the Governor could do that all the time.

SENATOR FLOREZ: That’s why Governor’s call for states of emergency. It gives the Governor the ability—

MR. JACKS: It gives the Governor the authority to move funds that are appropriated for a certain purpose. It doesn’t say that you can all of a sudden create new purposes. In fact, you have to draft regulations. You have to have regulations in advance before you can spend those monies. You can spend the monies. You’ll have to have regulations in advance under the Emergency Services Act.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Let me just give you a snapshot of what the Governor’s powers are in a state of emergency. The Governor has the ability to commandeer private property.

MR. JACKS: Absolutely.SENATOR FLOREZ: Now if that isn’t a broad power—MR. JACKS: That’s an extremely broad power. (LAUGHTER) SENATOR FLOREZ: That’s right. And remember he called for that state

emergency without any local government asking him to do that on the levees,

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let’s be clear. But, you know, I think overall the issue simply is, and I know that we’re going to go back and forth in terms of who calls it first. Let me just kind of put this to rest and say I hope the task force really does look at the dual nature of locals ask or Governor asks, and all we’re asking for is a balance while we figure out what that standard is of vulnerability. At some point there is a meeting of—

MR. JACKS: Absolutely.SENATOR FLOREZ: --you know, as I said, not every mayor knows what’s

going on in another area. Not every ag commissioner knows that the rendering plants closed and there’s a thousand cattle dying in Kern. And they didn’t make a decision early enough to do that. I mean, and they all make the local decisions, but at some point in time, there is an interchange at the state level and I hope that’s what the task force—

MS. BOYNTON: One of the many of the people that you will see in the balance of your meeting today are represented on our task force. And the discussions around the state/local balance of power is a central aspect of what we will be discussing, and how we balance those.

MR. YATES: And Mr. Chairman, every ag commissioner in California knew exactly what was going on, because we have a conference call hook up with those folks and we had them here in Sacramento. And we sat down with Farm Services Agency. They knew exactly in every county what was going on and some of them naturally were not impacted like others.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Senator Denham.SENATOR DENHAM: And a state of emergency can still be called for the

heat wave that has just passed us.SENATOR FLOREZ: Sure.SENATOR DENHAM: And at some point if it’s determined that there’s so

much damage done to the agriculture community, or if there was another, you know, if we were in another situation where we had a loss of life and immediate expenditure could reduce that loss of life, again a state of emergency could be called for that, as well.

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MR. JACKS: That’s correct, and I guess, you know, I hate to speak about these authorities as though they’re cut and dried. This is not something that is like absolute cut in stone. These things change and shift depending upon the needs of that specific incident. And so, yes.

And also I’d like to say that I think that what’s more important than the proclamation itself, is you know, I’d like to see, you know, what we can do in the way of specific program or whatever that can actually result in something, you know, and so—

SENATOR FLOREZ: Alright. That’s why our mayors are here, because they actually have some pretty good programs for the state to consider, I mean, they did some pretty good things, too, as well. Senator Soto.

SENATOR SOTO: I was just wondering if there’s ever any questionnaires sent out on suggestions how to do things better or how could we have gotten better results. Do you ever do that or thought of it?

MR. JACKS: We have specifically by law we’re required to do after action reports. And so, and as are the locals when they make a local proclamation and so forth. And so for this incident, I mean, we are certainly taking a very close look at our operations, what we could do better. That’s a key part of the task force. You know, that’s why that was established is to make sure that we can do better in the future.

SENATOR SOTO: How thorough do you think they are?MR. JACKS: I think very thorough. I mean, I think that one thing that I

love about emergency management is the fact that we learn, you know, from these situations. We don’t do the same thing over and over again. We don’t fight the last war. We will learn from this instance as we’ve learned from all the instances that we’ve dealt with.

SENATOR FLOREZ: That’s what we all do in there. We’re all culpable in this. Senator Romero.

SENATOR ROMERO: Yeah, I mean it’s rather ironic we’re all sitting here in this nicely air conditioned room and talking about whether or not a state of emergency should have been declared. It’s a little bit ironic, I think. Going to the question of compassion, I’m not talking about those caregivers in the homes

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caring for the elderly. When I talked about the lack of compassion with all due respect, sir, I’m talking about you. I’m talking about this Administration. I’m talking about a lack of compassion that I perceive to have been demonstrated in this last heat wave which took over 160 lives and more, the vast majority in Senator Florez and I think Senator Denham’s districts. We in Los Angeles also suffered in that heat wave.

So when I talk about the lack of compassion, don’t take it down to the person providing the care at the bedside. I’m talking about compassion from the heart. Declaring a state of emergency to some extent, I’m a little bit appalled listening to you say what could we have done? Like a fire, like a flood, like a levy breaking—you know what you do? You get out there right away and Senator Florez sent at least three different letters. Senator Florez, I don’t know if you ever got a response. But at least three different requests, come out, do something. There is a coordinated effort as Senator Florez has said, we declared a state of emergency on prisons and we’re in special session.

I think a lot of declaring a state of emergency is declaring to the public something extraordinary is upon us. There is a tragedy. Lives are being taken. And let’s move deliberatively to make sure we can get those resources and coordination in place. And to a large extent, yes, a state of emergency is a state of mind. It’s the Governor of this state standing up to say to borrow an old phrase, “I feel your pain, and we are going to move to do something about it.” I’ll bet if you went back and talked to the families, the survivors of those 160+ individuals—and I’d like their names. I’d like to know who they are. I’ll bet you talk to them they would stand up and say you could do something more. C'mon, State of California.

So, I’ve just to got to say to a large extent I’m a little bit just appalled at what I still see the lack of compassion in this very nice air conditioned room, and hopefully, let’s move forward with many weeks of summer still upon us.

DR. HORTON: As a point of clarification, I certainly agree with the need for compassion. But, I did want to clarify that when I was talking about the compassion and the passion, I wasn’t talking about the bedside caregivers in the residents. I was talking about state employees working out of our offices that

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are responsible for inspection, licensure, and oversight of those facilities, and the compassion and energy that they showed by making themselves available over the weekend to ensure that every one of those residences was, resident facilities was called. So it was at a level of state employees overseeing those facilities.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. And let’s go back to Senator Denham. We keep cueing off of his good questions, so I apologize to him. So Senator Denham, we’ll let you finish—

SENATOR DENHAM: And just to clarify for the record, real quickly, the three letters that I’m looking at here and I’m looking at the dates the Governor was in the Valley, was in my district two out of three of those dates. I met with him as well as families, UFW and farm workers, visiting cooling centers, so I mean, the Governor himself, I felt, at least from my district’s perspective, he was out there.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Senator Soto, question?SENATOR SOTO: (INAUDIBLE) SENATOR FLOREZ: You did? Okay. Let me, let’s veer to solutions for a

moment, as well. The professor mentioned early and I think hopefully Senator Romero was on a plane. But we talked about the—you hit it right on the head without even seeing the presentation.

SENATOR ROMERO: ____ and I thought about it flying up this morning.SENATOR FLOREZ: The presentation was the areas of vulnerability and

most of those being socioeconomic factors, and those folks always, for many reasons, not having the ability to as the professor said, push the button of safety. In other words, the air conditioning for lack of economic means. A whole host of other issues that he mentioned. And one of the things he mentioned earlier I’d like to explore for your task force is the early warning response mechanism that the state should fund. I mean, at some point, cities want to do their thing, we ought to provide a grant program for cities to, in essence, have these call centers. And I mentioned earlier, Senator Romero, that we’re so good during campaigns of calling voters within, I mean, in three days we can pour through a district and contact every single voter. One of the issues I hope the

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task force will explore is the ability to find and to fine tune that area of vulnerability and have that automated system so that our mayors can avail themselves of this at any point in time for any sort of thing. Not, as you mentioned, heat particularly, because it’s a silent killer, so that a message can go out to what they should do to protect themselves.

I want to know your thoughts on the effectiveness and the feasibility of putting a system like that for the State of California from either a monetary point of view. Maybe all cities have a different picture of that or having the state, in essence, allow cities to tap into that. I mean, just your thoughts on that, on what the professor meant.

MS. BOYNTON: The implementation of a statewide system or the improvement of the communications to individual homes is an area that the task force is looking at specifically through an individual work group. We have come, there are a variety of different ideas that we have already talked about, most of which focus on partnering with the private sector. For example, volunteering the pharmacies to do something, yet they know who’s on what types of medications. How can we leverage that? How can we get from them automated phone systems that they can tap into and notify people. Schools—I certainly receive, I get phone calls all the time, not because my kids are bad, but I get those automated phone messages from my son’s high school on a regular basis. That means that Sac City Unified can reach I think there’s 33,000 kids.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Your son doesn’t forward his calls to his cell phone?MS. BOYNTON: No, this one is the one that says, you know, parents only

on the card that I had to fill out. So we’re definitely looking at those mechanisms that are in place and other aspects that we have through the automated warning system that is KHAN which is run through the Department of Health Services and certainly the activity that OES has with their automated dialing system.

We are focusing on how do we leverage those and then how do we spread that to the private sector and our other partners to provide the information in the best way possible.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, just so we’re clear for the record, you are what department.

MS. BOYNTON: I am Ann Boynton, the Undersecretary for Health and Human Services Agency.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, so you’re, you are recognizing the need for this and you understand some of the drivers of this. And let me turn to OES, because that’s really, we don’t have oversight over you. We have the Senate Health Committee and others here or the budget committee, we would be talking to you. But from an OES perspective, we do have oversight, and there is a government code as we prepare for this hearing, Government Code 8589.6. Let me read it to you, because you don’t know it by memory, but it says, “The Office of Emergency Services shall develop model guidelines for local government agencies and community based organizations planning to develop a disaster registry program. Adoption of the model guidelines shall be voluntary. Local government agencies or community based organizations wishing to establish a disaster registry program may consult with the Office of Emergency Services for further guidance.” And I guess my main question is should we direct them over to the Department of Health, because you seem to have a handle on it or is OES actually under that guideline produced, if you will, the guidelines necessary for local government for that registry. If you did, when did that occur, and in essence, what do these guidelines entail?

MR. JACKS: I’m not specifically knowledgeable about that provision. I will get back to you on that. All I can say is, you know, we’re working very closely with HHS as part of the task force. I think this is a huge issue—

MS. BOYNTON: They co-chair the task force with us. SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, but I just want to make the point that it’s in

the law now we create these registries. We work with our local governments, and I hope we can amend this bill to provide grants under some of our emergency funds to our local governments to implement this. You know, and I guess it’s safe to say that it’s one of those laws that, members, that we pass that it may even have passed when Senator Dills was here, for example, and we never kind of go back and do an oversight hearing and ask the question, was it

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ever implemented? And in essence, here we are today full circle talking about a registry and this may have been on our books for quite a while, so from an OES perspective, from an oversight perspective, we very much would like you to get back to us and see where those guidelines are, have they occurred, and more importantly, can they work with the task force in a way that provides these local governments some guidelines. Quite frankly, I think local governments can have probably stronger guidelines than the state. I think we probably don’t have any guidelines at all based on this statute. So I think we’re going to have to go from bottom up, if you will, and then try to mish mash all those local ordinances to fit the requirement.

The question I have may be based on that. It seems the Legislature was saying that the state should create a statewide registry. Is the task force looking or the small group of the task force looking at creating a statewide again, or are we private sector, or what?

MS. BOYNTON: It’s the discussion that the subcommittee will have and then take forward to the task force in terms of what makes the most sense from an operational perspective.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Now let me go back to my mantra. I know people are getting tired of it a little bit, but it just, I’m trying to see how far I can push you folks. And I know I’m going to be talking to the Governor a little later, as well. But in essence, if the Governor has the ability to commandeer funds and we can do this under a state of emergency, can we create grants for our local governments, create that registry based on the $2 billion or so that we have in our account for economic uncertainty for these types of programs. Not to say that local government could not handle it with additional funds, but of course, if we can always create emergency dollars for local government to create their programs, is this something we could have done under a state of emergency, we don’t need to do under a state of emergency, or are you guys pretty much have your handle on what we need to do?

MR. JACKS: I think we’re exploring possibilities. I don’t know if we could do it easily under a state of emergency.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, well it’s something I’m going to ask the Governor, but if we can do it, I think it’s good for the Governor to work, you know, to release funds and to allow some of our folks who can do it, and I know are talking about doing it already. So I don’t think this is an idea that came directly from our professor’s book for people in advanced reading, but I mean this registry idea has been there and the question simply is how do we now implement that and hopefully we can release some money. And if the Governor thought it was, we’re heading into emergency as Senator Denham said, never too late. We could try to provide some of that relief money to folks. And I’m just, just a thought process.

MR. JACKS: One thing I want to say, too, is ever since Hurricane Katrina, there’s been a lot more focus on this issue of trying to push out more information, especially to vulnerable populations. I think it is a really important issue. I think it’s one of the things that we’ve seen from this emergency that, you know, there’s some opportunities for improvement.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Members, are there questions for—yes.SENATOR DENHAM: Just one final comment. I would also ask you to

take a look at other counties outside of the Valley. I know the focus has been where we have 100+ degree temperatures for many, many days, but in Monterey County where you typically don’t have an air conditioner, because 95 percent of the time it’s very comfortable, but that five percent of the time we were medevacing many people out of extreme conditions that we did not have the huge loss of life, but certainly could have just because of the readiness of those different areas.

MS. BOYNTON: And we, in all of our activities, we did in our community care license facilities, paid particular attention to areas that we know don’t have air conditioning on a regular basis. It did get very warm in some of those areas, and nursing homes, for example, in routinely on the coastal areas, don’t have air conditioning. It doesn’t mean that those people didn’t need assistance. And so all of our, we focused attention on those areas, and we’ll continue to involve them as we move forward.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, great. From the Administration point of view, appreciate it. You know there’s always tough questions, and quite frankly, you had some semi-good answers. And I think the goal of it—

(LAUGHTER)SENATOR FLOREZ: No, let’s just be clear, we all can improve, okay.

Everybody, you know, no coach is ever going to tell you you’re perfect in life, and we all can improve. And the question is simply, we will offer from the committee point of view is we want to work with you from a task force point of view to try to produce some long lasting statutes that hopefully we don’t come back and ask—Art was just saying on 1991 statutes that I mentioned earlier, here we are, 15 years later are we ever going to do that. So hopefully we can kind of close this gap with you folks, and we appreciate it, all of the testimony, and I know we have other folks coming, as well, after you.

I’d like to thank you. Let you move on, and I’m going to move the agenda a bit. I’m sorry to do this to folks. I’d like to have our elected officials come up, Mayor Autry, Mayor Fargo, Julius Cherry, Rick Martinez, Yvonne Hunter, and Kelly Brooks. I’ll let you guys assemble here for a moment. I’m going to step out for one quick second as you’re sitting and then we’re going to go back to our utilities, okay?

MAYOR ALAN AUTRY: _____ I have to call him Senator now (LAPSE IN RECORD) lunch together as Dean and Al, and so--

SENATOR FLOREZ: As long as we’re not talking though letter, I think we’re in good shape.

MAYOR AUTRY: Yeah, but I do believe, I hope you can understand a certain amount of surliness on behalf of local officials. We are the first responders. We’re not perfect, never pretend to be. But, there’s a lot that was done right during this situation. And I was leery about this Senate committee, how it unfolded. Maybe I blended the political messages that may or may not have been out there into this issue of life and death, and I’m pleased to see that outside of a few blatant political attacks by certain individuals that by and large this is a real meaningful committee, and I want to commend you for that, because I think some good can really come about. Senator, I think you hit the

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nail on the head that nobody’s perfect. We’re all culpable, but we’re also, we did a lot of good things. The Governor did a lot of good things. He was there. He was not asleep at the wheel. And people that know me know that I’m not shy about disagreeing with the Governor when he’s wrong, he knows that. He wasn’t wrong here. He did, I don’t believe the state of emergency, now, Ms. Fargo speaks I think it’s unanimous throughout the cities and the counties, Democrat and Republican, that there was no need that we felt for a state of emergency. Let me tell you why. There’s probably four words you don’t hear much in local government. And those four words are, “we can handle it.”

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, can we put those down for posterity? Send that down to the Local Government Committee?

MAYOR AUTRY: You don’t hear that that often, Senator, I agree with you. You don’t hear that, because after years and years of the state taking our local money year after year, we had to go and do Prop. 1A in order to keep cops out on the streets. So there’s a lot of times we can’t handle it because of the situation. Believe me, there’s not a mayor or local representative that is shy about saying we can not handle it. If we felt we had, especially an issue such as this, if we felt there was anything meaningful that could have been done by the state, and they were there, I tell ya, I’m not shy about criticizing one or not, we would have asked for it. I think it’s telling that that did not happen in this case. If it was extended, Senator, a couple more days, who knows? We were all monitoring it. It was like a flood. You see what your resources are and what your, and your capability to meet that challenge.

As the representative said, I don’t believe and Heather turned to me when we were out there listening and watching, I think it was very well said. During this process with the tragic loss of life, we did not discern an unmet need that we felt the state could step up and make a difference on. And I hope when we come back, when you start the questions, Senator, I do want to get into some of the things that were done and some suggestions, because I think you’re onto some really, really good things here. I think if we can zero in on the demographic, if could stop the deaths of the elderly here, and this was true in Chicago and it seems to be true in every heat related crisis across this country,

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you’re going to reduce 80 to 90 percent of the deaths here. So even though it’s tragic that we’ve lost them, it also allows us to target those resources, and I think the focus and I’ll end with this and turn it to Mayor Fargo, if we can and I’m encouraged by this meeting, that we don’t turn it into a circus of blame. We don’t play the blame flame game. And we concentrate and learn on what was done right, because there was a lot done right, fix what was done wrong, and concentrate on solutions, I think what could come out of here is something historical.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you, Mayor Autry. Mayor Fargo, thank you for joining us.

MAYOR FARGO: You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting us and—SENATOR FLOREZ: The drive was not as far for you than Mayor Autry,

correct?MAYOR FARGO: No, it was not as far, and I appreciate the attention to

the issue, so thank you, Chair Florez, for bringing us all together to focus on this.As you know here in Sacramento, and many of you read our Sacramento

Bee along with your own local newspapers, we had a very similar problem to a number of other cities. And we did lose within Sacramento County, not within the city, but within the county, we lost 13 individuals in what we think are heat-related deaths.

We have some standard practices that we utilize in the City of Sacramento. We are in the Valley. We do experience heat on a regular basis. And we have several programs that we put into place. We open our community centers as cooling centers. We make sure that people know what is available, and we also have a program called Cool in the Pool where all of our, most of our pool hours are extended into the evening on any day that goes over 100 degrees. And we’ve been doing that, I believe, for the last five or six years.

In this particular instance because the heat not only didn’t stop for over a week, but also it didn’t cool down at night. For people who did not have air conditioning, that really was a big part of the problem. And one of your earlier speakers talked about the high lows, I guess we’re calling them now, and

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fortunately we’re not in that situation right now, but that really was a huge issue in a number of the instances that we had problems with here in Sacramento.

We, after, I think it was after the first week or after the first five days, I started talking with our City Manager and we held some early meetings with our Fire Chief, in fact, I’m joined here by Julius Joe Cherry, our Fire Chief who can answer some more of the direct questions you may have about our immediate response. But, we decided that we needed to have more cooling centers. And that, and after we had the first death in one of our residential hotels downtown, we met again and we had been monitoring the calls and, you know, what the health status of the community was through our regular process. But, we went ahead and deployed both police and fire fighters to go door-to-door in all of our residential hotels. We, I think, located about eight individuals that were having some heat related stress. We got them out of the situation, got them to cooling centers. I believe one individual we took to a hospital. And we did that for several days working with the managers of our residential hotels downtown.

So we had a lot of immediate response there. We’re also, we’re looking at now is to respond more quickly when we have, you know, two or three days of heat and we had been told I guess for three or four days by our local weather reporters that it was going to cool down, going to cool down, going to cool down. We were all hoping, but that didn’t happen.

So we, I have met now with the owners of the residential hotels in Sacramento. We had already, through our budget process, allocated $5 million for rehabilitation of the hotels downtown, and we talked with them, I talked to them about the possibility of air conditioning. A number of them actually responded directly. They had already, some of them had, I know the Ridgeway Hotel here, they had already put air conditioning units on each floor so that one room on each floor was a little mini-cooling center and had air conditioning in their lobbies.

We also set up in the Cathedral, we got the Catholic Diocese to open up the basement of the Catholic church downtown in order to use that as a cooling center, and extended the hours with fire volunteers and others. We have a community service center, a small center for the residential hotel residents that

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we extended the hours to, I believe, 11 o’clock at night in order to give them a very convenient cooling center. Kind of a quick over view.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah, others.MR. JULIUS “JOE” CHERRY: Good afternoon, Senator. I think it’s

afternoon. SENATOR FLOREZ: At the end of this, let me make clear where I’m

going to go, and I don’t know about the other members, but we don’t have direct oversight responsibility over you folks. Our issue as an oversight committee is to ask OES and people you saw earlier, in essence, were you on the job? And what can we do to improve and how we can make this better. At the end of the day, what I’d like to hear from all of you is best practices, and you know, moving towards the task force and how they need to build in some of these things, as well. So just kind of let you know, kind of at the end of the day. You know, I don’t want to second judge your immediate efforts. I always want to throw more money your way and Sacramento does in terms of I really wished the Governor would have done that, and I, of course, you heard me say earlier to OES how they could have done that.

But, from your perspective it’d be very valuable to hear the best practice aspect of this, as well, and then I do appreciate also the, as you said, not needing additional resources at that point in time. We may disagree on, but as Mayor Autry has said, you know, another two days, another day, another three days, Senator Denham says, well we don’t know what August is going to look like. There’s always opportunities to be prepared, and then I think that’s really the question, so I hate to interrupt you, but I just wanted to make sure that you understood.

MR. CHERRY: No problem. As the Mayor said, I’m Julius Joseph Cherry. I’m the Fire Chief for the City of Sacramento. Thank you for holding the hearing. I’m happy to be here to testify today.

I don’t have a lot of opening remarks. I’m basically here to answer questions. But, I’ll tell you that I was essentially the lead department head in our city for this particular situation, emergency planning in our city, our city manager’s technically the director of emergency planning, and the deputy

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director is the fire chief, which means he gets the credit, I do the work, which is perfectly fine with me.

Through the leadership of our mayor’s office, we had been talking about this issue through the weekend prior to the 22nd, 23rd, 24th, the dates start to run together in my head, about what was going on. The weekend prior to the deaths in our community, I had personally been monitoring the call volume of our communications center looking for, perhaps, spikes that we could specifically relate to heat emergency. And frankly, that weekend we did not have, we’re always busy. We’re running the wheels off our fire department and we’re always busy, but we didn’t have much of a blip on the radar screen that would have indicated that the heat was causing any more problems than it normally causes.

The other thing for me is, you know, for 30 summers now, my adult life, which is most of it, and five years as a volunteer, I’ve been working fires in this community where everyone of those summers it’s been 100 degrees or more. And so that’s not unusual. I think as it has been said earlier, it’s pretty obvious that the fact that it never cooled below 80 degrees at night during that time is the issue.

But, interestingly enough, as my observation of the hearing so far, some of the things that the professor talked about and basically as I counted them if I took notes accurately, there were about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven things that he suggested that local government, anyway, could do to mitigate a heat emergency. And by my count, we did six out of those seven things. I think the only thing we didn’t have in place was the registry which we are now through something called reverse 911 that you’ve all heard about. We’re now developing that registry after this heat emergency. And so this is an issue. Local government had to deal with it. I mean from our perspective they talked about the response from the fire department in Chicago. We also manage the paramedic program in the City of Sacramento and provided ambulance service.

We weren’t reluctant to use resources. Indeed, after the Mayor called me on that Monday or Tuesday morning, I forget now which day it was, we set up a command post in one of our fire stations downtown, brought in all the police

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officers that were on the street with my co-hort who was the acting police chief--the police chief was out of town on vacation, and myself got those people out and by noon we were knocking on the doors of our SROs, our single room occupancy hotels, checking on people and checking in with the management and as the Mayor said, there were eight people, five of whom we transported by Regional Transit bus to local cooling center. Two of whom actually walked to the cooling center, because it was a couple blocks away from where they were located, and one life that I’m pretty comfortable that I can say publicly was saved, because that person was indeed in emergency medical distress, and we obviously responded with an ambulance and gave them appropriate care.

The very next day, we opened our emergency operations center. A mini emergency operations center as it was, but down at our public safety building, police, fire, the county, we opened our emergency operations center and started an incident action plan that we referred to as Operation Stay Cool. And in a minute when you hear from my colleague, Rick Martinez, who as you know had a stellar career as fire chief is now our coordinator for our emergency management in the county, you will hear that we, in fact, had a coordinated response to this emergency. So with those opening comments, I’ll turn the mike over to former Chief Martinez, now the emergency coordinator for Sacramento County.

MR. RICK MARTINEZ: Thank you, Chief, thank you, Senator Florez, for the opportunity to appear before your committee again. I’ll just add just a couple of things in in the interest of time. First of all, I agree with everything that’s been said. Mayor Autry summed it up best. For local government in this particular case to what we’ve dealt with up ‘til now, we could not have used any other resources. We did coordinate the use of our resources reasonably speaking from Sacramento County’s perspective. And we started our process of review and after action last week, actually, we held our first meeting, because while, as the Mayor said, you know, a number of things were done well. And we can always improve and we’re going to look to improve.

But I would request with all due respect and I appreciate the Chairman’s comments with respect to looking towards funding for some specific areas,

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clearly our outreach, I think, now this is Rick Martinez’s initial review, because the data--we haven’t had the opportunity to gather all the data, but as we look at Sacramento County with its 13 deaths of which just under 70 percent occurred in homes and not SROs, as we look at the relationship of those individuals, we had 15, I think we actually went to 18 cooling centers which we were prepared to keep open as long as people were there. They were not used by the public. But, that doesn’t mean they weren’t necessary necessarily. It means maybe the message wasn’t right. Maybe they weren’t totally the right locations. The Mayor mentioned, you know, that downtown which was not just a cooling center, it was a standard social center that people were used to going to, maybe that’s it, so we’re reviewing those things.

But, my comment and what I’d asked you to consider as we look at outreach, as we look at the technical capacity automated phone system. Whatever that notion is, that we try to use a system which is already in place and we improve it as opposed to developing a new system over the top of something. Now what I’m telling you is I don’t know if a system’s out there, but I want to be very careful that every time we deal with emergencies, or every time we deal with a hot topic of the day, we tend to want to go out and throw money at something new and then something else wanes. I want to make sure and implore the task force that’s been assembled that they look at systems which can be enhanced which would reach the objective first before we develop a new system, because my experience tells me both my service at the state level and the local level, with no disrespect to anyone, a number of vendors will come forward wanting to sell us something new when we really need to enhance what we have out there today.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Didn’t you know the good portion of the room were vendors?

MR. MARTINEZ: Yeah, I know, and I have to walk that way to get out. I understand that.

SENATOR FLOREZ: No, I’m kidding.MR. MARTINEZ: I know.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: So, Rick, but ____ begs the question just on a follow up note to that, you’re a big city, I mean, or a county. I mean, the counties and the cities, the Fresnos, the Bakersfields, you know, some of the folks that kinda have, if you will, the empowered city manager model. And then there’s a whole bunch of other folks in the Valley, you know, that if we have a system, if a city does have a system we build upon it, the question is can you share? And if you can share, do we need the resources, and this is just something that I know the task force is going to come up with this sort of plan. And I’d only say that we can enhance systems, but as long as they can be shared in a way that allows for some of the smaller participants to be a part of, you know, the Fresno model, let’s say, you know, the Kermans, the Mendotas, the Riverdales, you know, the other folks that may not even may be incorporated. You know, is that possible in the systems that we currently operate today and it’s maybe a question for both mayors, as well, as a county.

MR. MARTINEZ: Not only it is possible, it’s something we should all demand. The fact is is that California has done well over time in responding to disasters by having an integrated response. The safety web that exists over this state whether it happens in some of the more remote areas as we see with fires on occasion or it happens in the metropolitan area. So when I, my comments and my request to you is just that. Make those demands that we continue to enhance and it be statewide. It can be incrementally broken down to the lowest local level, but it has the support and the backing of the rest of us, so yes, sir.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And the redundancy, I mean I think we also fail to recognize that with the best call center in the world, if the rolling blackout hits your call center, then what? So is there, are there ways to build on, you know, if you’re still operating in an upper portion of the state, is there a way to have that call center then maybe figure out a way, or some other way to deal with, you know, it’s the worst case scenario, obviously. You have something all ready to go and then it doesn’t work because it powers out and telephones today are run a lot plugged in. I don’t know if you got some ideas.

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MAYOR AUTRY: The question I have for you, in response to this because you hear urban legends one way or the other, but the blackouts they’re picked, right?

SENATOR FLOREZ: Yes.MAYOR AUTRY: That power, so the state can pick and target the most

vulnerable areas and say July 26, 27, 28 we’re not going to black that out. Correct?

SENATOR FLOREZ: Yes.MAYOR AUTRY: So I mean, I think, again, ___, I’m not trying to it on a

spot, because we had heard, you know, at the local level we don’t always get that pristine information.

SENATOR FLOREZ: No, but I think this is exactly what we have to coordinate. I think it’s a great issue for the task force to figure out how that, if in the redundancy question—

MAYOR AUTRY: You mentioned earlier that you could take and do a demographic of your most vulnerable, especially elderly, most impoverished. Those are the ones that are dying. Older poor people. There’s no way getting around it. And sadly, in San Joaquin Valley, we have a preponderance of that demographic, so if that can be isolated, then during the most dangerous times that you just simply don’t click off the switch.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And the byproduct is you have a, and the byproduct, Mayor Autry, is that maybe as you think about that, maybe a lot of these small businesses that never want to be turned off move to our areas and empower some of the, you know, wow, let’s go to Mendota, you know, the power never goes off there in the event of a really bad stage two. Maybe it’s how we get economic development, Yvonne, I don’t know.

MAYOR FARGO: You know, we actually, we utilized our reverse 911 system in Sacramento and we actually targeted the neighborhoods that we thought would have the majority of frail elderly, you know, lower income, possibly without air conditioning.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Mayor Autry may have solved the—the question I have gotten from a lot of folks that promote this idea, as well, if rolling black

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outs, it doesn’t matter, but if we can in essence, coordinate it from a state perspective with all the centers that were, that might make—

MAYOR AUTRY: I think that’s what you’re talking about here. The main thing is team work, state and local government. If I could, because I’m afraid that I may miss, because I think it’s extremely important, I know that we’re on a time frame, but this demographic of the elderly, you can really get some tendencies there and I think the targeting of the resources is going to be huge. Can you ask what the state can do for resources in the future? Let me put this forth, because I think it’s tremendously significant. We’re all infatuated with the internet. The fact of the matter, the folks that are dying, most of them don’t have the internet. They didn’t—

SENATOR FLOREZ: (INAUDIBLE) MAYOR AUTRY: The best way to reach those folks are through free

television. They watch Oprah, they watch the soap operas. Now if free television, if there was a mandate during times of crisis—maybe that will be part of the what I’m sensing here is going to be an expanded executive order power to include heat related crisis and their peculiarities. That, having that ability to require the networks to run on the bottom of Oprah continually, you can really get a lot of bang for your buck and I think directly prevent loss of life, because to put it on the internet, most folks have the means if they have the internet, to escape the heat.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And that isn’t in the vulnerable population area.MAYOR AUTRY: Yes, so I think that—MAYOR FARGO: And to follow up on that, there’s a concern many of us

in local government have with the telecom legislation that’s going through, in that it doesn’t appear to us that there’s going to be a requirement that they do the public service announcements that currently is part of our system.

SENATOR FLOREZ: That’s a good ____.MAYOR FARGO: So, if we could get the legislation adjusted—SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah, to deal with that. And let me—I need to do

two bills in Approps and I knew that point was coming, so if I could have Senator Vincent or Senator Soto continue, I’ll be right back.

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But, let me just simply say that here’s what worries me a little bit. Are you all going to be on or participate in this task force again, or are we, at the state going to, in essence, come up with our best and brightest—

MS. YVONNE HUNTER: Senator? SENATOR FLOREZ: Yes.MS. HUNTER: You’re looking at two of the participants on behalf of our

or—Yvonne Hunter, League of California Cities. I’m representing the League, I think Kelly is representing CSAC.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay.MS. HUNTER: There is a representative from the California Fire Chiefs

Association, from the California Police Chiefs Association. I’ve had conversations with both of them. The reason the League is exactly—the reason we were invited and the reason that we are on the task force is exactly what you said, what Mayor Autry and Fargo said, it’s the communication. We bring, we are in touch with our city officials. We brought their perspective and so we will be active participants.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Small cities, as well, because I know there’s a league of big cities and there’s a league of small cities sometimes. So small cities included.

MS. HUNTER: Senator, we have a different perspective, I think, on what the League represents.

SENATOR FLOREZ: But, I want to make sure that that small city that may not have—

MS. HUNTER: Senator, you don’t have to ask that of us. That is part of what we do and that is part of my personal responsibility.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, I was just saying, because there have been disagreements in many cases where big cities have a different idea.

MS. HUNTER: Senator, when it comes to health and safety of our citizens, there is no difference.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. Yes, Senator.SENATOR SOTO: There’s the other association is the Contract Cities.

There’s a way to get if they can get a hold of—

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MS. HUNTER: They’re members of the League and we are in touch with them.

SENATOR SOTO: One of the other getting the notice would be—MAYOR AUTRY: Ms. Soto, can I, I also, do you want to get into best

practices I think in our remaining 10 minutes where the Senator wanted to focus is or some other issues—I think you really onto a “catch 22” there are some core realities here we have to face, and that are essential to making progress here that we don’t have a loss of life like we had. Again, you can’t measure life that’s saved. You can only measure those lost. I think we saved a lot, thanks to the great work at the county local level.

But, this issue of affordability and energy of making the choice between cool air to keep you alive and food on your table or being kicked out of your home, is a real crux core issue that really has to be addressed. And I think this perfect storm of which it wasn’t, I believe, living out in the hot weather, picking the cotton, and going through all this stuff with heat my whole life that it was the accumulative effect that contributed largely to the loss of life. Not just one hot day. And another particular figure that came out of the, which was not part of precedent, that was the hot nights. It didn’t cool off so you had seniors who would run the air conditioning during the day, but say I’m going to cut it off at night. And I’ll be okay. I can get it through another day. Well, they did and that cumulative effect when you’re talking about battling congestive heart failure or you’re talking about diabetes or you’re talking about diseases that keep you on, you know, the balance between life and death anyway, I believe strongly that that contributed to a loss of life, and that’s one issue we have to fix, because I tell ya, they’re not going to turn them on. They just are not. I remember when I came home from doing Heat of the Night, I was making pretty good money. I walked in my mother’s house and she has a swamp cooler. It’s not working. It’s 105. I said, “Momma, what are you doing?” Well, so I’m gonna get you an air conditioner. Let’s go get an air conditioner. I go off and I do another season and I come back. I walk in the middle of August. I’m sweating again, and I said, “Mom, how come the air conditioner’s not.” “I don’t turn it on because it costs money.” “Mom, I pay your bill. Turn the air conditioning on.”

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But, what if you didn’t have a son who was fortunate way beyond my deservability to make a living like I did for awhile, that doesn’t happen. So I think if we focus on those issues, I think we can make a lot of head way. I’d just like to ask my colleagues for their opinions on that.

UNIDENTIFIED: (INAUDIBLE) MAYOR AUTRY: No, we are well represented here. They’re great. SENATOR SOTO: _____ I think the availability of phones and having

perhaps the task force come up with some plan where they could get a hold of people by phone and say, you know, we’re expecting major temperatures tonight. Keep your air conditioners going or do something about the heat. Something that would alert them, because maybe—

MAYOR AUTRY: But, alert them that they will be paid for that. if they, hey, the check’s in the mail type thing, but it’s really in the mail, I think it’s going to have to accompany that or they’re just not going to make the—

SENATOR SOTO: Well, we did say, said something about the, at the beginning of this hearing about having the task force say something about subsidizing people that can’t afford. And maybe that ought to be considered or talked about with the task force, subsidizing those that are really at risk, the elderly or the infirm, and have some kind of subsidy that would help them out to be able to afford some of these things that they should have, but can’t afford.

MAYOR AUTRY: I think that would be a very wise course to take.MS. KELLY BROOKS: Kelly Brooks, I’m with the California State

Association of Counties. I’m actually representing a number of county entities, rural counties, urban counties, welfare directors, county health executives. There actually are existing subsidy programs and I think part of the issue is people may not be fully aware of them, and I think certainly something the task force should be thinking about is making sure that those low income vulnerable seniors know that those programs are out there and that they are easy to access, and perhaps, you know, providing some assistance with folks making sure that they have the forms to fill out and understand what’s available. And something that we were very involved with during cold weather, and I think we need to rethink that for hot weather emergencies, as well.

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MAYOR AUTRY: We’re talking just about a 20 and 30 percent.MS. BROOKS: Yeah, there’s the care programs and other things like

that.MAYOR AUTRY: That’s not going to, that’s not really going to see a lot

of these folks that are on a fixed income. I mean, it helps, but I don’t think that kind of 20, 30 percent rebate is going to keep folks feeling good about leaving their air conditioner on ____. But, I mean, I know what you’re saying and that needs to be out there.

MS. BROOKS: Our association has sort of formed an internal group to talk about some of the issues. And I presented written testimony to all of you, so I don’t necessarily need to go through that. But, I can talk a little bit about some of the recommendations and some of the things that we talked about internally that we will plan to bring up at the task force. One of the issues we focused on was, is coordination. We definitely agree that the State Office of Emergency Services should sort of be the hub for all types of emergencies and we should be building on the existing emergency response system.

I think an important sort of difference between this heat emergency and perhaps others is that there really wasn’t a heavy involvement with public health and with sort of the human services world in trying to reach those vulnerable populations. And so it’s important that at the state level not only is OES involved, but also the state Health and Human Services agency so that we can make sure we get those kinds of resources and are able to outreach to that population. But we want to be very clear that the existing system works. We think it’s an excellent model. The national government has sort of copied what California has done, and we certainly don’t want to sort of waste any resources by trying to create something new when what we have is very good.

One of the other things that we discussed was the trigger, so how do you know when to call a heat emergency? We definitely concur with moving forward in identifying triggers for heat events, but we also recognize that a one size fits all approach is not going to work in a state as large and diverse as California. Any triggers that are developed should be developed on a regional basis and take into account variations in climate. And since temperatures can vary so

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much by county, we think counties probably should be the ones to pull the trigger, so to speak, that initiates a response to a heat event.

We also think it’s important that the triggers be developed in conjunction with meteorologists. The triggers should be based on the best available science. For example, it sounds like it’s not just air temperature, but perhaps heat index, as well. So those are the kinds of things that we need more information about. Additionally, we suggest that state and local governments agree to use one source for weather forecasting, so we’re all on the same page.

We also have had some conversations about the vulnerable populations and what we should be doing. A number of counties went forward with a number of activities in this area. We recommend that the task force develop a common definition of vulnerable populations. So who are these folks? Who should we be targeting? Clearly our counties are focused on the elderly and dependent adult populations, but we’ve thought a little bit more about this and perhaps some of these activities should have included populations such as certain mental health clients, as well, certainly given the experience in Sacramento.

Another one of the challenges for state and local officials during another heat emergency is going to be breaching these vulnerable members of the public. I mean, to the extent that some of these folks are on public programs and counties have contact with them, certainly we’re able to contact them. But to the extent that folks are not availing themselves of public services, we may not know where they are or know who they are. And we’d also like to point out that some of these programs that serve our vulnerable populations like the In Home Supportive Services, like Adult Protective Services, are not funded in a way to allow for reimbursements for the kinds of activities that we undertook during the heat wave, and we would love to work with the Administration and the Legislature to assure that to the extent that we’re doing additional activities during a heat wave, that we don’t have to reduce services elsewhere for other programs.

And another thing that we, in talking with county public health officials that we’ve learned is there’s not a common definition for heat related death.

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We recommend that for consistency across the state that the state work with local health officials to adopt one.

And then another area that we’ve been discussing is outreach to the public. And we’re very supportive of a state investment in an outreach message. What are the public health messages that we disseminate to the public. We think this is going to be really important as we’re going to see more heat events. For example, wider dissemination of information about leaving the air conditioning on if you’re vulnerable to heat, drinking lots of water, opening windows, these are all very appropriate and would be very beneficial during this kind of an emergency. And at a minimum you could, the state could develop some of these materials that could be reproduced and disseminated at the local level. Some of the, I know some of the counties already have this in place, but I think it’s important that they are done statewide, particularly for some of the smaller counties that don’t have the same sorts of resources that the urban areas do.

Another piece that we discussed is the 211 system. It’s actually a 24-hour system for health and human services information. And to the extent that this is not available statewide, because of differences in resources, but it’s a hot line that people can call to get information and I think it’s certainly something that was utilized in the urban counties that had it during this last heat emergency, and potentially could be another important source of information to the extent that we are confronted with more types of emergencies that require sort of a health and human services infrastructure response, the state might consider further investment in the 211 system, which frankly, is going to vary from region to region depending on resources. There are places that do not have 211 systems and even the places that do sort of struggle with funding.

And I’d just like to thank the committee for having us today and I’m happy to answer any questions.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, well, you’re both on the task force, is that correct?

MS. BROOKS: Yes.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, so we should be asking you for help, because at the end of the day, this committee’s doing oversight, but if you’re on the committee and—let me just ask from a perspective sitting on the committee and you had a meeting on Friday, first meeting, both participate?

MS. HUNTER: Well, there was a meeting on Friday. There was also a meeting two days before before it was with basically similar people before it was originally constituted or officially constituted. There also was a conference call that the Administration had I believe the week before that all local governments or organizations were invited to and that was very, very helpful to get basic information. And within 30 minutes of the conclusion of that call, we sent out a notice to city managers, public works, police and fire using the League’s listserve capability to give everyone a heads up and basic information.

I think just as it relates to and I agree with everything that Kelly said and that previous speakers—one of the questions that Senator Florez asked is about do we want to reinvent the wheel or maybe it was Mr. Martinez. There are existing systems and the task force has talked about that and from the league’s perspective, there are things that we learned in the energy crisis that we did, that the classic cliché, it’s déjà vu all over again. We’ve basically turned our listserve capability over to the Administration for any appropriate, that’s our escape clause, appropriate messages that they need to send out about the need to conserve electricity so that the grid does not crash, and information about heat emergencies. We did the same thing during the energy crisis.

There is the existing OES local emergency response system, the CLETS system, and I cannot tell you what that stands for, I used to know. And those systems, I think, are appropriate for the emergency response personnel. There’s been a lot of discussion now and there was during the energy crisis. If that is the appropriate system to use to get information out to mayors and city managers. And there’s a fine line when you do not want to clutter up that system. So they are exploring reinvigorating an existing call system that the state had towards the middle and end of the energy crisis that frankly, I think virtually every single city, small and large, was invited to, and I know every county, was invited to sign up and have one or two key city people get email,

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phone number, pager. I signed up. I got messages at home and at the office and those are the kinds of systems that I think the state is looking to set up again for heat emergencies.

As several speakers have said, there, finding the right tipping point is the difficult issue. Is it a couple of days of very, very uncomfortable, hot weather with a few warm evenings, or is it going to extend into five, six days, two weeks, and that is something that I think is going to require some very good thinking along with meteorologists. When do you, what is the trigger?

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, let me ask a question. Just the mindset going into you’re both representatives on the task force and don’t take offense, I just want to ask the question or we’re never going to, you know, kind of walk from the hearing and go no, I never asked the question. Given that Mayor Autry and others and the professor, we know where the hot areas are. You know, kind of we kind of can sum it down to I don’t know how many counties in California, but it isn’t, you know, the this, if you will, Los Angeles or any of these folks. Why wouldn’t the Governor in creating the task force, the Administration, include Mayor Fargo, Mayor Autry, some of the, Mayor Hall, you know, or a group, I’m not trying to, I don’t want to blow up the way it’s formed, I’m just asking you the question, do they take a different mindset into the room or do you go and, I mean, are you of the belief that everything that this task force comes up with we’re good as you know, Yvonne, we always some up with great ideas and go and now you pay for it. I mean, we always, the state does. We kind of mandate down, but if we’re going to come up with all these great ideas from the task force point of view, is your mindset from the county and city in there that the state’s going to be putting, paying for a good portion of the burden in that room, or are you kind of—

MS. HUNTER: Senator, what a lot of the task force is talking about is planning, putting protocols in place, planning for good government public safety, heath and safety, and that’s what local governments do.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, so you’re going to burden, you’re of the mindset that if we come up with all these great ideas you’re going to pay for it? That’s what I’m, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Are you going in saying

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these are just minor tweaks and we just have to kind of look at the emergency preparedness and the cities are going to bear the brunt of paying for this and the counties? I got poor, I have poor rural counties. We’re not Los Angeles County. Let me just use Kern. Forget the cities for a minute.

MS. HUNTER: I don’t think that a large city or a small city is going to say we’re not going to do good planning. We’re not going to sit down and reconvene our public safety personnel, and no one is going to say we’re not going to sit down with County OES, our local OES and reevaluate our mutual aid system until the state pays us. Absolutely not.

SENATOR FLOREZ: I’m not saying that.MS. HUNTER: But, that’s what you’re implying.SENATOR FLOREZ: Well, let me—have you talked to the City Manager

of Shafter?MS. HUNTER: No, I have not.SENATOR FLOREZ: Talked to city manager Parlier?MS. HUNTER: No, I have not.SENATOR FLOREZ: Talked to city manager of Selma?MS. HUNTER: No.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, this is what I am talking about. They already

are talking about to a vendor about a system that they’re going to pay for, $10,000, $12,000 a year and they’re making decisions already.

MS. HUNTER: To do what?SENATOR FLOREZ: To create this registry that we’re talking about.MS. HUNTER: That’s an entire—if we’re talking a registry, that may be

an issue where certainly there is a cost question.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t you pay for it.

That’s all I’m saying. Go in the room and we’re going to mandate some of these things. Sure, if you can do it, great. But, if we’re going to mandate in this process different protocols that require cities and counties to do different things, all I’m saying is I hope we’re going with the mind set the state’s going to take some money out of our emergency preparedness and all the stuff we have here to pay for it. That’s all I’m saying. That doesn’t—

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MS. HUNTER: You raise a very, very good issue in, and one of the key concerns for those of us from local government on the task force is what kind of mandatory activities is the state going to require us to do and who’s going to pay for it. Clearly that’s an issue.

MAYOR AUTRY: Senator, I want to commend you, and I think were on the same team here.

SENATOR FLOREZ: We are. I’m just trying to figure out—MAYOR AUTRY: I appreciate your passion, Senator, because I, you

know, we share a similar background and they do get forgotten in the whole scheme of things, so I really appreciate. I may be wrong on this, because we can’t be too vigilant on this, but I do believe Prop. 1A takes care of any unfunded mandate of that. Now we’ve got to make sure that there’s no loopholes in that, but I think, but it’s certainly worth the scrutiny that you’re putting it under. I just, I want to commend you for that, because you know, you don’t want to be left out.

I think the spirit here, Senator, is this. We at the local level, although we don’t kind of sometimes don’t express it enough, but we really understand that when we take in terms of resources from the state the way this structure set up, we’re taking away from some other place. If you take a National Guardsman, send them to Fresno, put them out there and drive a senior to a cooling center, we love that, but we know there’s another task like that, so we’re very vigilant, I feel, very protective and understanding of that, because we’re all in the same boat. To say the city government and the state government’s not in the same boat is saying, hey, your end of the boat’s sinking. We are so inextricably connected here.

So, but I want that message to be loud and clear that it’s not about we don’t want the resources. Dad gammit, we do. And I went to commend you for making sure the weakest are not left behind in this new emergency order. And I tell you, it’s really, really important, because what I’m sensing here is again, this task force, working with this committee and your leadership, Senator, and the Governor’s leadership is a redefined or a new executive order to encompass the

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unique aspects of that, and we can’t, we gotta make sure that nobody’s left behind and vulnerable.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Because the most vulnerable, if we were to take that map of this, you know that there’s a certain portion of Sacramento City and there’s a certain portion of Fresno City, but in the smaller, more rural cities, that is where we may not be able to afford some of the recommendations coming forward from the task force.

MAYOR AUTRY: And therein lies your deal in terms of it being regional. I would encourage this committee when this thing is constructed that what triggers that to the degree possible a regional executive order for a declaration of emergency. I think that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s not on the coast where you’ve got the ocean breeze that you’re going to have to regionalize this. That to the degree possible, Senator, that you can take the politics out of that meaning. If it’s requested by the local government, and I would think that counties would be the ones to do this, I don’t know what mechanism you construct, but put the onus on the Governor, whomever that governor may be, to not declare it. That it could be done quickly, swiftly, this is thing that is on us in a hurry. They kill a lot of people in a hurry and then they’re gone. It’s like a predator in the night that jumps on you.

So I would encourage that, because it’s not going to be statewide and how you put it together ____.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah, and I’m not, I’m just wondering given that this task force has the League of Cities and it has the counties, and we each have a representative on it, it’s just that, you know, for most of us and the reason that, you know, people have asked why is this such a, why do you got, you know, some, you just keep going on this thing. And try to tell people that 160 deaths, 80 or so wind up coming from the 16th Senate District, that is an emergency if you’re the Senator from the 16th Senate District, trust me. If it’s emerged from a mayor with the, you know, with deaths in your district, that is a lot of people, and so what I’m trying to hone down with and which I want to have discussions with the Governor himself on is, is the, it’s hard because Yvonne is very strong advocate, I know, but are we passionately as well getting those small cities to

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the table. And I’m not, I know you will, Yvonne. I just want to make sure that we do. I just really mean that, because this is where the deaths are going to occur. This is where that vulnerability map will take place and it isn’t to knock the larger cities, the San Diegos, the L.A.s, and others, but I just think that these cities have special, unique characteristics about them that do not allow us for in many cases to have, you know, bigger city answers.

MAYOR FARGO: If I could jump in on that as someone who’s a board member of the League of California Cities, most of the board members on the League Board are from small cities, and so they, and when we’re there in the room we all have equal votes, we all have equal voices and I know when Alan was a member of the board as well, I mean, he, on a regular basis spoke up for the small cities, made sure that we didn’t forget them. And a number of us do that from the larger cities. This is, we sort of view these things as—

SENATOR FLOREZ: But, you’re on the board. They’re on the board.MS. HUNTER: Senator, if I could—MAYOR FARGO: Yeah, oh yeah, the majority of our representatives are

from smaller cities. Because most of the cities in California are smaller.MAYOR AUTRY: If I may, because I have a perspective sitting on that

board being from a small city. I think we’re getting a little bit of, because they really do, Senator, watch out for us. But, I had the same questions with the same passion as you had to the board until I was convinced, because I ____ and I can understand your line of questions.

SENATOR FLOREZ: I’m just going to ask the question so I can live with myself when I walk out and I won’t say anything more.

MS. HUNTER: And actually, Senator, this, and I thank our two city officials here, this line of discussion actually has given me a few ideas. We always try to reach out to all of our cities to find out what is going on specifically in their communities so we can tailor the League’s response accordingly. There is a conference call of the information subcommittee scheduled for, I think, Thursday morning, and after that call, because of the wonders of the internet and our regional staff, I plan on after contemplating this exchange, I think I will

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be sending an inquiry out to those cities, city managers in those areas, this is what’s going on. Tell us what works, what doesn’t work, what do you need.

SENATOR FLOREZ: That would be wonderful. That would be great.MS. HUNTER: I’ll send you a copy.SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you.MS. BROOKS: I just want to assure you that CSAC internally has sort of

gathered the family, the county family together public health, county welfare directors, urban counties, rural counties, geographic representation across the state. We sort of have an internal working group so that they can advise us sitting on the task force. And then we’ve asked some of our experts to sit on some of the subcommittees so that they have somebody from the ground talking to state officials, they can say well this is how it really works in practice.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And I feel comfortable with Yvonne’s approach that, you know, people are contacted at a smaller group of folks have mostly impacted by deaths, I mean, we have different reactions. City of L.A. during this heat wave spent $840,000 for dead tree limbs. Mayor Fargo and Mayor Autry probably spent that amount getting people on buses and moving them to cooling centers. And it’s the same heat wave. So here you have completely different responses, one dead tree limbs, city council, the other life saving movements of dollars in many cases internally. And so, you know, I just want to make sure that that is, you know, we have different reactions, obviously to that.

MAYOR FARGO: If I could follow up on what Mayor Autry said in terms of what the state could do, because I think that clearly is your focus. There are a couple things. A lot of the frail population that we deal with, not just in our hotels, but people living alone, have mental health issues. And mental health funding in this state is woefully inadequate and people who are mentally ill may not have the capacity to go to a cooling center and for a lot of our frail elderly, as well, even if they don’t have mental health issues, they’re on a number of different medications which I think the heat tends to exacerbate. So there’s a number of issues that are health and mental health related I think we have to keep in mind.

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The other thing which I think the state could do, we have a Spare the Air Day program here in Sacramento, and it’s in a number of places. We also have the, you know, stage one, two, three, whatever alerts. They’re based on—the Spare the Air one gets a little bit close to health-related issues. And it suggests that people that have respiratory problems don’t go outside. We don’t have any measurement for heat. The stage two alert is really about saving energy, it’s not about health care. It’s not about saving lives. And so if you’re a good senior citizen and you’re living alone and we, someone comes out and says, you know, you need to turn your thermostat up in the summer, you need to conserve energy, they may be taking that more seriously than some people that could actually do it and handle it. And I think that maybe we need to have a different measurement for people that are frail or for the elderly and saying, and encouraging people that are healthy to turn their thermostats down, but if, you know, it’s like giving seniors free, you know, light rail passes when they reach 85 or whatever it is. I mean we need to separate, we treat everybody the same and we ask everybody to adjust their thermostat, and it’s probably the little old ladies living alone that are doing it.

And so we don’t have that measurement and that’s something the state could do either through Department of Health Services or something and when there’s a heat index and here’s the threshold and here’s the kinds of things you need to be doing. Because we do it for Spare the Air, don’t let kids run around outside, don’t do the sports things, but we don’t do it for heat. And maybe we need to come up with a measurement that the state could do. That and frankly we don’t do enough for affordable housing and I also think the state should require air conditioning or cooling centers in our multi-unit places the same way that you do for heat. We don’t have a requirement for AC.

SENATOR FLOREZ: I know all the state people are taking notes, right, because of the heat _____.

MAYOR AUTRY: Senator, I just want—SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah, go ahead.MAYOR AUTRY: One other issue real quick, and I hate to say real quick,

because it’s one of our most vulnerable segments that gets lost in that, and I

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don’t really begin to know what the state can do, because there’s very little I’m finding as much as we try to do at the city level. That’s with the homeless. We, the City of Fresno, did a program to get water to the homeless, but they don’t, by and large, watch television. It’s a mental health issue. We sent out a group of what we call city stewards, former homeless that went through a program that can kind of talk that language. Hey, I’ve been there on the street type thing to get them to come into the centers. You can’t bodily force somebody to come into a center. It’s a problem I grapple with and it keeps me awake at night. In the issue of Fresno, we lost people, homeless and very durable, you know, even with those that are under addictions, but again, I don’t know where the state—but, I think it needs to be in there for discussion, in the task force, because they are really a vulnerable population, but again, it’s really frustrating to try to deal with other than get them water and ____.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah. Let me ask a final question of the panel. I know—number one, the survey of just being as much as you can provide the task force obviously is really important. Let me just ask a question and I don’t mean to interrupt comments, but at the end of this, do you as the, let me ask the mayors, because they are elected. Do you as mayors have enough emergency powers on your own to really get anything you wanted to get done in the heat related emergency, meaning, you know, I’ve mentioned ad nauseum, probably, about the Governor’s powers to cut regulation and cut through all the bureaucracy to not have to go to the Legislature to ask for permission in many cases to do this. Do you as mayors have those types of powers during a severe and life-threatening heat wave? So in other words, let’s say the Governor did call for state of emergency and he can do all that, but does that then empower you to do similar type things, or do you think there’s value in that or do you have all the power that you need at this point in time? It’s just a question for the task force more than it is probably for the committee. Pull people out of homes—

MAYOR AUTRY: I don’t, something of this nature, and that’s a great question, Senator. I don’t believe I think even the call, the day of the call and to be able to access and mobilize. I think at the end of the day if you have a

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system where the local officials could declare the emergency and have them access immediately to the resources and have a responsive system in place, they could make those available quickly, that would be the best of all worlds. Hold us accountable if it’s misused. That is a super question. No I don’t think that we have nearly the powers to move quickly on something like this.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And I think something that the, as mayors think about what that might look like, I mean, we don’t want to mandate it, but of course, I mean, there is some immediate things that can ____ be more immediate on the local level, frankly, and you know, there are things that emergency folks can do and, you know, I think you do it, right, for health and welfare you do it, but pulling the triggers from a mayoral point of view or the chair of the county board of supervisor’s point of view just kind of wondering. I know that the counties got together, they’re in an emergency and they moved, they just moved cattle, you know, and I’m not sure, you know, let’s say the chair of the board under that said, you know what? Land fills, we’re not doing. We’re going to allow them to bury them right there on the dairy premises. We know that probably breaks every single rule, but at this point in time, 72 hours later, 1,000 carcasses, that’s what, I’m making the decision to do that. Those types of decisions, I think, is an interesting thing to ___.

MAYOR AUTRY: I’d like to qualify my response Senator. Under what we went through now, because that’s our frame of reference, what we could have gotten from the state under the present emergency order, I don’t feel would have benefited us much. Now what you come up which would be available with your reform, when all of these good ideas get gathered to be able to access that quickly via a mayoral or city council or city manager initiated emergency worker is what I was talking about.

MAYOR FARGO: I think I would concur with Mayor Autry. I don’t think the powers are there at this point in time, although we have a charter form of government and a lot of that power, for example, to declare an emergency is with the City Manager, not with the Mayor. But, our, we have a pretty collaborative process that we do in local government. And not only with the county working with the cities, in particular our city, as the county seat and the

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largest city, but I think that in terms of dealing with this last heat wave, I don’t think there was any additional power, unless it was supernatural, that would have really helped us respond to the problem. I mean, we had our police department, fire department, and our cooperation with the, you know, with the Downtown Partnership, the county, it all worked together. And part of that is we’ve been spending so much time together working on flood preparedness, frankly, and emergency preparedness that way that we have done, I mean it’s a very similar process in terms of evacuating people and that sort of thing.

So I think emergency preparedness across the board is not what it needs to be in California.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Right, and that’s what we’re all here, how do we improve the entire system?

MAYOR FARGO: Right.SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you, all. Appreciate it. Okay, let’s have if we

could, our utilities, Ed Bedwell, Gary Schoonyan, Ken Floyd, and Carolyn McIntyre. Folks are still here. And we appreciate you being here. Talk a little bit about programs.

Thank you, all. Appreciate it. If we could, if we could start with Mr. Bedwell, would appreciate it, Pacific Gas and Electric. I don’t know if you have written comments, but the name, nature of the panel is, how do we start this? First, let’s see, Governor and Senator Feinstein asking for relief. The state having some programs. I know in my local area the Salvation Army runs a portion of it. There are other organizations that offer relief, as well. The question is, how does it all work in a heat wave and any improvements you might see in programs would be appreciated. But, maybe you can just give us the state of how it all works from your perspective and ____.

MR. ED BEDWELL: Okay. Senator Florez and other members of the committee, Ed Bedwell, Director of State Government Relations for Pacific Gas and Electric here in Sacramento. I’d also like to try and touch on a couple of the questions that the chair has raised as we’ve gone along.

I want to support the comments of ISO president Yakout Mansour. I think that everything that he said tracked with our experience during the heat wave.

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In fact, as he indicated, we had record usage throughout PG&E’s service territory, and for a matter of perspective to the committee, as you may recall, those that are familiar with PG&E, we serve generally from Bakersfield north to the Oregon border with some pockets of irrigation and municipal, and we share some surface territory with our colleagues at Southern California Edison in the southern part of the Central Valley, including some of the Bakersfield area.

So that gives you an overall area perspective, and we’re kinda divided in this heat wave interestingly enough into two sections of the state. We have the Central Valley which there’s been a lot of conversation and discussion today about the heat which we’re kind of used to in the Central Valley. But, in the coastal areas, San Jose, Monterey, and Senator Denham’s area, up through the Oakland area, that’s where we really took the burden of this heat wave in terms of equipment. And that’s one of the areas I wanted to address, one of the questions Senator Florez had earlier.

Supply was not a problem for us. We had adequate supplies. The ISO did invoke the stage two implementation orders. We did ask customers to curtail their usage as was discussed with the ISO president. All of that worked relatively well.

In going forward, Mr. Chair, just for the record, you asked one of the questions what can be done in the future, one of the questions that we and the PUC has forced upon is are we adequately prepared going forward in the future? And the Legislature and the CPUC has looked at that requiring the utilities to procure in advance through the AB 57 mechanism through a 15 percent reserve utilities are required to have and we are currently before the PUC for approval of an additional 2,200 megawatts of additional load to serve the PG&E service territory. Now this load also is being distributed geographically so we can serve load where it is needed, where the growth is occurring and with less impact for development of required additional new transmission systems which are the big lines that are most difficult to site in the State of California as my colleague from San Diego can attest to.

So going forward, we are comfortable in our ability to supply power to the residents within the PG&E service territory. Now, to specifically address one of

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the questions that the chair asked, our problem with this heat wave was the lack of cooling that occurred predominantly in the coastal areas, and the impact that it had on transformer usage. We had about 6,600 events of outages. Now those can be a single outage, it could be 3,300 customers, it could be larger than that. But, it involved approximately 1,400 transformers. And those transformers failed predominately in coastal areas where we did not get cooling at night. Where we had temperatures sustain for the week, for a period of about a week where we did not get below this figure that has been used consistently today, below about 80 degrees at night. And it just did not allow the equipment to cool to carry the amount of electricity that it transforms down to usage.

We are taking a look at that equipment issue within PG&E’s system. The PUC is also looking at it, so there’s an issue where the state is involved in trying to correct the problems going forward. I will say I think the cooperation between the ISO and PG&E was outstanding during this. I also think it was good amongst other agencies such as Department of Water Resources, which was a real easy entity in the State of California to drop load. In other words they were more than willing to pump at different times of the day to release load in our service territory to be better used for cooling in other areas.

Within the customer programs, we did work with local governments and jurisdictions. Once we were into this sustained two and a half, three week heat wave to alert customers of various cooling centers that were available. For those that were preidentified within the PG&E service territory, we called back out to those people who had made a record towards PG&E that they had heat sensitive issues, and we advised them of where they could go, how they could deal with this heat if they chose or were in a situation where they were not seeking or receiving the comfort level that they needed. We posted that on our website. We had links as an example, Senator Florez, to the Kern County, all of the Kern County locations that were open for cooling centers, which I can leave a copy if the committee is interested. Our media entity at PG&E outreached in all of the media jurisdictions in concert with the stage two program that you’ve heard about today urging conservation, urging that it is acceptable if you are

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comfortable to move your thermostat up to approximately 80 degrees instead of the 78 that we normally recommend during these heat waves.

With regards to programs that are out there, one of the things that we did find or that we do find is that sometimes as Mayor Autry pointed out today, people do make choices in how they use their service. In other words, we are aware that when you have an extended period of time and you use air conditioning or high energy usage, you’re going to have a bill that’s going to show up 30 days later that is going to be substantially higher than it was the previous month or previous year. People are aware of that, especially in the Central Valley. It’s expected during the summer. This was well beyond what we’ve had in recent years. We’re not in a position to calculate whether this was a one in 50-year event or a one in a hundred year event. But, we know it was an unusual event, there’s no doubt about that.

We’ve gone out to customers now and explained the REACH program (Relief for Energy Assistance through Community Help), the CARE program (California Alternative Rates for Energy). We are also making available to customers should they contact us, we are making this program available though our bill inserts and communications. That if they so feel a need they do have the ability to stretch their payments out over a period of time, they can call the PG&E 800 number and make arrangements to stretch that bill so that they lessen the financial impacts to that individual family or that individual customer.

One other, I want to tie one program back in to the—SENATOR FLOREZ: Is that an opt-in program so in other words, you’re

saying that those who need that relief contact you?MR. BEDWELL: Yes, sir.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. But, you know who they are so why wouldn’t

you contact them?MR. BEDWELL: We know who they are. Could you—we don’t

necessarily, I mean—SENATOR FLOREZ: You said earlier you had a preidentified group of

folks you said that you kind of have an idea that, who the heat sensitive folks are. You said that.

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MR. BEDWELL: Yes.SENATOR FLOREZ: And then, so I’m asking you why would you wait for

them to call you? Why wouldn’t you call them?MR. BEDWELL: I’m sorry, I thought you were taking the question on the

concept of the stretch payment, I’m sorry. On the—SENATOR FLOREZ: No, I’m asking you about the stretch payment. I’m

saying if you have an identified group of folks that you mentioned earlier, preidentified who need that type of assistance, why would you wait for them to call you to offer it?

MR. BEDWELL: To offer the balance payment program?SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah.MR. BEDWELL: We will make a change in that.SENATOR FLOREZ: I mean, you don’t have to make a change in it, I’m

just wondering.MR. BEDWELL: I don’t know the answer directly to your question. It

makes sense.SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah, okay, so that. And secondly, in terms of if the

state were to provide in a substantive way additional funds in the event of these types of situations, Governor Schwarzenegger and Senator Feinstein are asking $100 million from the feds for a program that would give some relief. But, if we, the state were to come up with a $100 million program based on an emergency basis out of our account for economic uncertainties, for example, would you be more anxious to call people if you knew $100 million was going to provide some rate relief for your customers?

MR. BEDWELL: We are always looking for ways to improve ____.SENATOR FLOREZ: How much did PG&E put into its own program? I

know it was a recent upping of dollars.MR. BEDWELL: In the REACH program?SENATOR FLOREZ: Hundred thousand?MR. BEDWELL: We added an additional $100,000 to the REACH

program.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: So what does the $100 million look like versus $100,000 in terms of actually impacting people?

MR. BEDWELL: Well, it would be significant. SENATOR FLOREZ: What would be the outcome of that from your

vantage point? What benefits would come about if your program ____MR. BEDWELL: To the REACH program we could, well we, the REACH

program under the current allocation is a $300 one time payment, so if you take that $300 into the million dollars or million five or whatever the figure is, you’d reach a lot of people.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Let’s talk about that. That’s what we need to talk about.

MR. BEDWELL: And let me also, for the record, let me also let the committee know that at the beginning of the year PG&E, through shareholder contributions, contributed $350,000 for direct payments, another $350,000 for administration, and our customers and others have contributed over $1.5 million to that program. So anything else that would be allocated would be helpful.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And I say that only in a sense that obviously it’s not an ongoing program and we have extraordinary circumstances where heat is reached, you know, 50-year level, and you know those are at this point coming and you know that the Governor has the ability to loosen up some funds in our, let’s say our account for economic uncertainties. It’s called that for a reason, economic uncertainties. We weren’t certain it was going to happen and shouldn’t happen. In many cases it’s an uncertain event that we have to put money away for for these types of endeavors. And that’s why we call it the account for economic uncertainties.

So given that if we were to delve into that and we were to make those types of programs available to our utilities for relief for those most vulnerable, that’s something we have a structure for. Okay, that’s what I’m asking.

MR. BEDWELL: With that, let me I think that’s the PG&E situation. Let me turn it over to my colleagues to answer any questions that other senators may have.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Carolyn, go ahead.

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MS. CAROLYN McINTYRE: Mr. Chairman and members, Carolyn McIntyre on behalf of Semper Energy, also representing San Diego Gas and Electric which is a Semper company.

First of all let me start by saying SDG&E I think performed extraordinary during the heat storm, I guess it’s being called. They did suffer some outages, mainly because of overstress on the equipment, over stress on the distribution system. They did move very, very aggressively to restore service. They had most service restored, in fact, about 75 percent of the outages were restored within about six hours. Within 12 hours, 98 percent were restored.

However, of the 40 to 50,000 outages that we actually did suffer, they believed at the time that those occurred that those individuals could be out for as much as 24 hours and did initiate a telephone contact system to contact those individuals and let them know that there was a possibility that the power would be out for 24 hours. Again, I want to make the point that 98 percent of them had their power restored within 12 hours.

We do have some infrastructure challenges in San Diego. While we are moving very aggressively to make repairs and update and upgrade our distribution system, we have problems that go beyond that with infrastructure. San Diego, because of it’s geographic location is kind of an island out there by itself in that we really only have one main transmission line coming into San Diego. The usage in San Diego increased during the heat storm to usage levels that we did not anticipate seeing until the year 2012. Quite frankly, we think we were pretty lucky to be able to continue to provide power with the infrastructure that we currently have, because we do suffer from significant transmission line constraints at times. We are in the process of trying to obtain permits for a new transmission line. The federal government just Tuesday identified San Diego as one of the national corridors that is in fact in need of additional transmission.

So, we are currently before the Public Utilities Commission to gain approval, their approval to be able to build what we’re calling the new Sunrise Power Line in San Diego which will enable us to bring in a lot more electricity in the future.

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In efforts to respond to the emergency while it was actually occurring, we did open our emergency operations center in order to be able to both monitor the system and monitor, quite frankly, the weather and the responses that we were getting, or the notifications that we were getting from the independent systems operator so that we could continuously provide information to local governments, law enforcement and to the media to get public service announcements out to the public so that they would be aware of what was going on and know what to anticipate.

As I indicated, we did call customers that did suffer outages, but we also made calls to individuals that we are able to identify as on life support or using medical support equipment in their homes. We were able to identify those individuals, because there is a different rate structure for those individuals. We gave them calls to let them know that they may want to insure that their back up energy source is available, or take advantage of some of the cool zones that are established in the City of San Diego.

We also have some community-based organizations in San Diego that focus on the elderly and individuals with medical conditions that will also provide assistance to and make sure that those individuals have a place to go. To the extent that those individuals are in need of transportation, we will provide bus passes for transportation.

Another thing that we did that may sound, you know, like a no brainer, for lack of a better term, is that we suspended shutoffs during the heat wave. I mean, there are individuals that were prescheduled to have their service discontinued because of lack of bill payment or what have you. We suspended all shutoffs during that period of time.

We do have the up and running 211 program in San Diego, so that was also used to provide information to customers on what types of services were available to them.

If I can go to programs that we are currently focusing on right now to provide some assistance to customers, we do have the CARE program which does in fact provide a 20 percent bill discount for low income customers. There’s also a program called FERA (Family Electric Rate Assistance), which is a

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federal program very similar to CARE, but applies to households of three or more individuals. Does not give them the same 20 percent discount, but does allow them to take advantage of a lower rate structure.

There’s also the LIHEAP program which I heard mentioned here today. Our own shareholder or corporation sponsored program is called Neighbor to Neighbor. We did increase our contribution to $250,000 which does not sound like much, but we’re much smaller geographic area than PG&E.

We also, we do outreach to notify individuals of these programs, not only by activating a system within our call centers by making information available about these programs to public assistance agencies making applications available to public assistance agencies to ensure that individual know the programs are available and are in a position to take advantage of them.

One of the concerns that we do have that we are not certain how we’ll be able to mitigate other than offering extended payment type plans, is the fact that there are customers that are going to suffer a significantly disproportionate increase in their bills. And not only because of the increased usage that was caused because of the heat, but because there’s also something that’s currently in law that protects customer usage of 130 percent of baseline, if they use 130 percent of baseline or less, they are exempt from all rate increases. What that means is that the rates for customers that use more than 130 percent of baseline are significantly higher. And so while they have always been higher and in San Diego where you’ve had 55 percent of the customers that have been under that 130 percent of baseline, we’ve had a very small group of customers that have, in fact, been paying the upper tier cost. And we expect the cost to increase overall for everyone, but it will significantly increase for those customers that ended up using more energy and will not receive the baseline protection.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, I have a question for you before we go on. The rate structure, the telephone system, the weather monitoring, and the suspended shutoffs kind of where I’m going on this. First of all, the rate structure. At the end of the day you kind of ended with that, but do you see a scenario where in these emergency situations that can actually be changed in

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the negotiation with you by the Governor or someone of this sort in an emergency situation? The Governor can commandeer private property during, you know, if you will, a levee emergency which he called. I’m just wondering if that same type of negotiation, the Governor actually went in and said, look, we need to negotiate this with you, the utilities, on an emergency basis, and we’re going to try to figure out, obviously trying to make folks whole with our reserves. But is that something that could have happened that might have happened or has ever happened, I guess is the question.

MS. McINTYRE: Well, I’m not aware of it having happened in the past, but to the extent that, you know, the government wants to step in and provide resources in order to offset costs, I’m certain that is something that we’d be willing to talk about.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Those would fall under current categories you have CARE, is it FERA program which is a fed program, Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP). There are models, the same question I asked Ed, there are models for enhancement, and I would say enhancement in the way that your shareholders enhance programs on a limited basis, but if the state really felt that it was long lasting need there on an emergency basis, where I’m going again is that, you know, the Governor is working as hard as he can to get economic aid to agriculture, right. We’re a billion dollars or so and USDA and you name it. And at the same time, you know, there are, there’s another economic disaster called people with bills in their hands. As the outcome of a quote, “natural disaster,” and even though we’ve asked for 100 million with Senator Feinstein, we’re not sure we’re going to get that. The question is if we came up with a funding plan for that or immediately out of our, let’s say our reserves, would you work with us to get us the best possible bang for our buck, I guess would be the question, and would it help, same question I had asked Ed, you know, would that help not only the ratepayers, but others?

MS. McINTYRE: Absolutely, I’m certain that San Diego Gas and Electric would be more than happy to look at state resources to help customers with their bills.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay.

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MR. BEDWELL: Senator Florez, I just wanted to add one thing to what Ms. McIntyre said. I realize this is the G.O. Committee and it’s not utilities & commerce, but this 130 percent of baseline is becoming more and more of an issue, not only because of weather patterns and growth in the State of California, but the way we live our lives today. Many, many homes in California now have a standard computer or two computers. The way we live is different than the way we lived in the past. And this 130 percent of baseline which was enacted during the energy crisis is, we’re going to see some very significant bills. In fact, while we’re waiting to testify, there was a gentleman in the back who told me what his bill was and it’s not going to be unusual. And they are substantial bills. They are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars, approaching, in some cases at the upper end with a larger home and more things in your home, let’s say, it won’t be unusual for some bills to come out in the $800 and $900 a month range for electric bills. Because when you get to the third or fourth tier, you’re paying about 25 or 30 cents a unit of energy. And that’s very, very expensive power.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Alright, you weren’t talking to my father sitting in the back, were you, because that’s the issue when you live in the Central Valley, obviously, the impact, as you know, Ed, is tremendous. And the, you know, it’s again interesting. We have very quickly gathered the economics on the agricultural disaster and we almost have quantified that and gone to Washington to ask for the funds. And we have an impending economic disaster recovery plan that’s necessary for those who are going to have to come up with this. And that’s very much a part of, we think, the emergency that the Governor himself should have, and hopefully still will, recognize as the next piece to this. Question is, you don’t go and sit and ask the Governor that unless you, the utilities, have a real plan or structure on which to provide that and to sit down and negotiate that so it actually works for you and more importantly, works for the ratepayers.

MS. McINTYRE: The structure is there, and you know, of course the Public Utilities Commission is the ultimate, you know, guide for us, but to the

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extent that, you know, the state wants to make resources available to assist customers with bills, I can find no reason why the utility would not consider that.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. Thank you.MR. KEN FLOYD: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee.

Good afternoon. My name is Ken Floyd. I’m the director of customer service for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, (SMUD). We have a little different business model than my colleagues. SMUD is a public-owned utility owned by the citizens of Sacramento County. Basically, it’s a non profit, so we operate the business a little bit differently. We certainly have the same, share the same concerns that we’ve heard here today from my colleagues and others. We think there are some things that’s important prior to an event like this. System maintenance and making sure that you’re very aggressive and consistent with your system maintenance, make sure your system is in good shape, make sure your transformers are not covered with shrubs. Make sure that your air or cooling systems are operating properly. Those are things that are very important, because you want to try and do the best you can to minimize outages. You can never prevent all outages, but you certainly want to do the best you can to minimize them. These are things that will help minimize those outages.

Aggressive outreach to customers. One thing that utilities are challenged with is getting good information from customers, having them give you good telephone or contact information, so when we have a crisis like this, being able to reach out to them. Today it seemed to be, I’ve been in the industry for over 30 years and it seems to be a little bit more difficult today than it was in the past. People want to hold the information closer, and they have multiple numbers. So it makes it a little bit more difficult to be able to contact them in emergencies and times when you want to. And we try a lot of different things.

SENATOR FLOREZ: But, it’s pretty easy to contact them when you need to collect, though, right?

MR. FLOYD: I’m sorry?SENATOR FLOREZ: It’s pretty easy to find them when you need to

collect.

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MR. FLOYD: No, it’s not always that easy when you want to collect, either.

SENATOR FLOREZ: In other words, it’s just hard to find them.MR. FLOYD: It is. And we work at that. I know not only, SMUD is not

only doing that. The rest of the utilities are trying to get good contact information for customers.

The third point I want to make on the front end prior to an event like this is energy efficiency. That’s something that all of us have engaged in. SMUD is a leader in the industry around energy efficiency. You want to help customers. First of all when you cool the house, keep the cooling in. That helps keep the bills down. It helps keep the house or the place where you are, the place of residence, from getting too hot. We have to be very aggressive in that area and I think that we’ll see more and more of that as we move down the road.

Some of the things that we experienced during the course of these events—SMUD serves the Sacramento County. It’s about 600,000 customers. We had a number of outages. We had 245 outages which affected about 48,000, 49,000 customers which is about eight percent of our customers base. That’s a lot of customers. But, the magnitude of this event we responded with, I think our equipment held up extremely well and our responses were very good. And the way we measure responses is the duration of an outage. The average outage of these 48,000 to 49,000 customers was about 86 minutes. And during the course of an event like this again, 86 minutes for anyone that’s out is a long time. But, if you look at it in an aggregate, we think the equipment held up pretty well.

We had 153 distribution transformers. We lost some underground cable, and we replaced 72 protective devices. We did activate our emergency response room just like this was a storm during the winter, or whatever the case may be. We went into emergency operations. We had crews operating around the clock. So it was an event. We reach out to local agencies when we activate our emergency storm room. We reach out to police and fire. We’re very active in collaborating with them. We reach out to the Sacramento Area Housing

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Authority, the Health and Human Services here in Sacramento. We have a pretty strong network in terms of what we do with them.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, let me ask a question. In a time when heat, oh, excuse me, when the heat is as hot as it is and people need to run their air conditioners, do you also suspend your shutoffs during that time?

MR. FLOYD: Yes, we do. We have an automatic policy. Anytime the temperature in Sacramento gets to 105 degrees, doesn’t matter whether it’s one day, two days, or three days, we suspend.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Somebody owes you, you don’t say, tough, we’re shutting it off.

MR. FLOYD: No. again, as a community owned organization, that’s not something that—and my colleagues in the other utilities, I think, most of them have similar policies.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. And in terms of the additional programs, we talked about CARE, and HEAP, and—you are, can you participate?

MR. FLOYD: Yeah, we offer those programs. We have something called an EPA program. It’s an energy assistance program where customers can get discounts.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Someone gets their SMUD bill this month, are you going to be able to provide relief for those folks that may not be able to do that, as well?

MR. FLOYD: Yeah, we have, actually, we have programs, again, being a non-profit, we don’t have investors or shareholders.’

SENATOR FLOREZ: How do you do it, then, _____.MR. FLOYD: Community. We have people actually every month put up

so much money. They take $5 extra or $10 extra taken out of their bill. It goes into a pot. Customers that qualify for those funds, we share those funds with them.

SENATOR FLOREZ: How much was that last year?MR. FLOYD: I don’t have that number, but I can get it for you.SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. How much would it be if we could release

funds. Same question I’ve asked both of you. If the Governor and the account

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for economic uncertainty and we think it’s an economic disaster and we want to put some dollars into that, it would be a tremendous help for your rate payers?

MR. FLOYD: Absolutely. And we have, the infrastructure’s already there. With the existing programs we have today, I mean, the infrastructure’s already there.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Thank you very much.MR. FLOYD: Things that worked—good communication. All

transmissions and generation systems were available. We had very few forced outages where we had to force equipment out of service because it was overheated or it wasn’t functioning properly. High generation availability. Some of our proactive measures, I talked about system upgrades. Making sure the system is maintained. Prioritization for restoration—if you’re going to have outages, you’ve got to have a strategic plan to show what customers you want to restore first. Those of course, emergency respondents, emergency facilities, and so forth. Proactive measures—contracting with supplemental crews. You know the event is coming. Make sure you get the outside crews available and ready to help you respond. Identifying and recruiting of low income customers. These are again, I talked about the community organizations that we work with. We also had prepared talking points for our folks at our contact center. Making sure that when customers do contact us, we have 4,000 contacts from customers every single day. So we prepared talking points for customers, also advising them don’t shut off your air conditioner. Raise the temperature. And normally we advise customers to set that thermostat at 78 degrees. During this course of this event, we told them to raise it to 80. If you’re away from the home, you might want to think about raising it to 84, but we don’t want them to shut it off, because then you have a double problem. Not only are you exposed to the heat, it takes, you run your energy bill up even higher trying to cool the home down again. So those are things that we do on a proactive basis.

SMUD goes out in the community when you have an event like this. If someone is in need of air conditioning and we hear from our community partners, the city and the county that it’s taking place, we go out and we take evaporative coolers, not fans, but coolers. It’s like an air conditioner. We loan it

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to the customer for however long they need it during the course of the event with no charge. We talked about some of the programs. I won’t go through the programs, the energy help programs that we have. We stop disconnecting, third party notification program, payment arrangements. We’re very flexible with customers if they get a high bill. My colleague from PG&E mentioned about being able to extend bills a little bit longer. One of the challenges, Mr. Chairman, is that in the course of an 11-day event like this, customers may have five additional days where they had extremely high air conditioning, cooling on that bill. But, what we’ve experienced lately is unusual cool weather, so we’re looking at, for some customers, the offset is going to be about the same. So that’s not necessarily the case with all customers, but you try and gauge it and you do try and proactively when, if you can, call customers. You try and call them, but if they do call you, you offer as much flexibility as you can in terms of spreading out payments.

SENATOR FLOREZ: In terms of the rate structure, as well, is there flexibility in your rate structure in terms of a negotiated process, indeed, in an emergency situation we need to give, if you will, energy users for those most vulnerable or those that may be on your list as, if you will, participating in some sort of preidentified program, the ability to make a decision to keep an air conditioner going?

MR. FLOYD: In terms of extensions or? Of course. I mean, our board, we have a seven-person board that’s elected by the folks of Sacramento County. They set the rate structures. We have tiers just like the other investor-owned utilities. SMUD, I’m proud to say, we’ve only had two rate increases in the past 15 years. So that’s another thing we try and be aggressive in terms of keeping the rates down. But, if customers need some assistance in terms of giving relief because they have a high bill, we can’t. I can’t change the rate structure on the fly. It has to be done by our board.

SENATOR FLOREZ: By the board. I gotcha. MR. FLOYD: Lessons learned or opportunities—it was mentioned earlier

about the way we model a design system, most transformers are designed with a 40 or 50-year life expectancy. What we’re seeing today in a lot of the more

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mature areas, or some of the areas where we’ve had transformers out for maybe 20 years, we’re seeing loads starting to grow in those areas because of the addition of new technology in the home, whether it’s a plasma TV or whether it’s two or three TV’s in the home or two or three computers.

Some of the talk that you hear that’s going on in the media today around utilities is about automated meter reading or putting smart, intelligent meters out in the field. We think that kind of technology is going to be beneficial because it will give us as a utility a better understanding of what’s taking place at the customer premise as opposed to a geographical area. Right now most of out telemetry is set up to where we can monitor areas or circuits that may have 3,000 or 5,000 customers on it. With smart metering, that will give us an opportunity to be able to understand what’s taking place at each one of those individual customer homes. So that’s some of the things that will help us in the future.

Again, I appreciate the opportunity to be here today to share some of the things that’s happening at SMUD. I’ll be more than happy to take any questions that you may have.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you. I think I’ve asked the questions that I needed in terms—the weather, Ms. McIntyre mentioned, the ability our utilities and the interaction of ISO, I mean, is that also happens at SMUD level?

MR. FLOYD: Yes. SMUD has it’s own control area, so we’re very much, we are not controlled by the ISO, but we do have to operate with them, because there is power flowing through our system and we are connected to the ISO grid.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you very much.MR. FLOYD: You’re welcome.MR. FLOYD: Okay. MR. GARY SCHOONYAN: Hi. Gary Schoonyan. Southern California

Edison Company. I appreciate the opportunity, Chairman Florez. I’m going to start off with just giving a sort of an overview of what happened during the heat storm with Southern California Edison. There was some discussion with regards to the transformers. That was the biggest area of concern that we had. We lost about 1,400 transformers during the heat storm. To sort of put that in context,

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we typically, about 12,000 a year fail, so during this two week period, we lost 1,400 out of the over 700,000 transformers that we have on our system.

We also experienced, it was sort of unusual, as well, during the heat storm, some lightening storms which caused a number of downed lines and what have you. And typically it was the downed lines that caused the longest durations of the outages. We had outages that affected over a million customers, some of which lasted 30 seconds, but others which lasted up to 72 hours. And typically the longer ones were a result of downed power lines as opposed to transformer failures.

With regards to developing the infrastructure to try and get ahead of things like this in the future, the higher loads that we’ve heard about that customers are using at this point in time, we embarked upon a significant infrastructure replacement program here in the last year. In fact, over the next five years we will be spending close to $10 billion on transmission and distribution infrastructure, much of which is upgrading and replacing the aging infrastructure that’s sort of the post World War II expansion in the Southern California region. And a lot of these replacements, as I’ve mentioned, we’re targeting kind of surgical replacement of those areas in those systems that are in the direst need of it.

We are also going out to the middle of this month for an additional 1,500 megawatts of new, long-term capacity. We do, like all the other utilities, numerous renewable solicitations for additional capacity. And like the other utilities we're very aggressively pursuing energy efficiency. In fact, our objective with the very aggressive program that we have is basically to serve half of the customer load growth going forward with demand side alternatives, be it demand response or energy efficiency measures.

I guess one other thing that I did want to highlight is that when we do have outages similar to the other utilities, we do make contact, the public aware that there has been an outage, particularly those of a significant duration. Similar to what Ms. McIntyre had indicated, we have what we refer to as a medical baseline database. These are customers who opt into a program to at least notify us that they do have some sort of a medical concern. And such that

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there is an outage, we have ongoing communications with them throughout the period.

We also funded, we’ve been funding for four years now, cool centers within the hottest parts of our service territory, predominantly in the Riverside and the San Bernardino County areas. We fully fund 13 of these centers and provide supplemental funding to another 17 of the cooling centers.

We’ve also been experiencing or experimenting with a program whereby we would provide portable ac units to those, during the heat storm, that are in need. And we’re looking to expand this program with the PUC’s permission and hopefully, get as many as 600 to 800 of these units available for those that are in need as determined by community-based organizations. And I can’t emphasize enough that a lot of this is working with the local governments and community-based organizations. They have the best feel for their constituents and their citizens.

There’s been a lot of discussion with regards to rate relief and the CARE program and other sorts of programs.

SENATOR FLOREZ: You got all those programs?MR. SCHOONYAN: Yes, we do. The one that I’m not sure we’re doing is

the one that PG&E talked about, which is basically the one where you can defer payments, but we have other types of programs that are similar to that to help customers. And with regards to our CARE program, we have over a million customers that participate in that, receiving rate relief, typically on the order of around 20 percent, some upwards towards closer to 30 or 40 percent.

And just to piggyback off what the gentleman from SMUD had indicated, it’s very difficult to change rate structures. However, it is not difficult to provide different means of rate relief. And the types of questions that you had of the other members with regards to what you would do with additional funds, it would be directed towards rate relief to those that truly need it.

And we, like the others, do not shut-off customers during heat storms, just like we do not shut them off during freezing temperatures, both extremes basically, we sort of withhold doing those particular functions.

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And the final thing I want to say is in the area of the conservation pleas that were made by the state, by the utilities, by the ISO, it’s pretty, we haven’t really dissected as to what effect each individual effort had. However, on our system given the temperatures that we experienced at peak time, we were anticipating loads that were about 1,000 megawatts higher than what actually materialized. And we believe a lot of this result in the reduced consumption on the part of our customers, came from a number of different efforts on the part of, like I said, the utilities, the state, the ISO, and others to try and get customers to conserve. In fact, even by driving down the freeways, you could see on the various billboards, indications reminding customers to conserve power. Anyway, that saved quite a bit, at least from our perspective on the order of four to five percent of customer usage at time of peak. Thank you.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, great. Is there anything that you’d like to add that I did not ask? I think I asked every utility pretty much the same question in terms of structure. Okay. Thank you all. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Okay, we are now heading to our panel on community development with Lloyd Throne, Director; Maria Juarez, Director, Deputy Director; Joan Graham, Deputy Director; Jim Hare, Assistant Director; and Kristen Bengyel. I hope I pronounced that correctly--Fresno Public Authority Director. Thank you all, for sticking around.

MS. KRISTEN BENGYEL: It’s Bengyel. SENATOR FLOREZ: Bengyel. Thank you. I’m trying to pronounce ____.MS. BENGYEL: I kind of have to get rid of that “y".SENATOR FLOREZ: Is that what it is? I appreciate it. Okay. Well, thank

you for joining us. Very much appreciate your testimony and we certainly would like to start with, if we could, Lloyd.

MR. LLOYD THRONE: Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here on my 26th day of the job, so thank you very much. What I will try, Mr. Chairman, not to be repetitive from everything we’ve heard this morning, but CSD, the Community Services and Development Department is fairly unique in the fact that it is 100 percent federally funded. I think it’s probably the only department in the State of California that is.

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I would like to piggyback a little bit on the profile of the clients of the LIHEAP program, and then if I may, explain the LIHEAP program. We’ve been nibbling around the edges of it, and I think it’s important for everybody to understand the parameters of the federal LIHEAP program.

Low income households spend more of their income on energy than most Californians. The Department of Energy (DOE) came up with all U.S. families spend 2.7 percent of their incomes on energy. Low-income spend 12.8 percent of their incomes on energy. There’s a double whammy going on right now, not only as we heard prior speakers talk about this, about the vulnerability of the low income, but there’s also a spike in natural gas prices. So they’re suffering a double whammy.

Added to the profile of our clients for LIHEAP, 49 percent of the households, and this is DOE statistics, receiving weatherization/LIHEAP services have one or more family members with disabilities or are elderly. Added to this, 90 percent of the incomes of LIHEAP clients are under $15,000 per year. And two thirds of the clients families have incomes of less than $8,000 per year, to put this in perspective of who these, who the vulnerable are.

If I may, Mr. Chairman, I would like to talk a little bit about the LIHEAP program. Just, we’ve kind of been nibbling around the edges of it all morning and I’ve heard numerous speakers talk about it. The LIHEAP program in California received, in 2005 it received approximately $91,262,000. The low income households in California, and this is census data, are 3,072,625 households. The California households served in 2005 by LIHEAP were 215,029. That’s a seven percent penetration rate. LIHEAP is divided into three parts and I’m sure most people understand this, but I think it’s important to go over this. Number one is the HEAP program that we spoke about, and that’s the Home Energy Assistance Program and I’ll read verbally what it does. It provides a direct payment to low income clients’ utility bills to help offset the cost of heating, cooling in their home. That program alone in 2005 served 135,318 households with an average payment of $217.

The second part of LIHEAP is the ECIP, and that’s I think, what we’ve been talking most about, the Energy Crisis Intervention Program. And that is as it

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states, provides assistance to low income households that are facing crisis situations such as having received 24, 48 shut off notices. We recently, through our provider network, and we have 80 agencies, 80 grantees throughout the State of California, 46 of which provide energy assistance programs and the coverage is every county in the State of California. So through ECIP, 40,377 households receive service. The average payment, again, this was 2005, was $303.

The third part of the LIHEAP program, and I promise there’s no more than three, is the weatherization services program. And that’s the program that weatherizes homes. And by federal statute, that’s the one program that has to have 25 percent of the money dedicated to that cause. The first and second programs HEAP and ECIP are locally determined what percentage goes into what. And I really want to underline that, that this is, as the professor stated, it’s a very kind, to use his word, effective program, but every year in Congress it has substantial challenges. Excellent, excellent program.

As I said, our penetration rate is a mere seven percent. We were somewhat fortunate in ’06 to receive 63 million PVEA funds which got our penetration rate form 12 to 15 percent in ’06. But, since ’06 is not over, I don’t have the data for how many households that will serve.

One correction I would like to make is the ECF, the Emergency Contingency Fund that we’ve been talking about that the Governor and Diane Feinstein asked the President to release. That’s part of LIHEAP, and that is, that represents $101 million emergency contingency funds. That’s for the whole United States. That’s not for California. I wish it was just for California. Historically, historically we have received anywhere from six to ten million out of that fund.

SENATOR FLOREZ: How many?MR. THRONE: Six to $10 million out of that fund.SENATOR FLOREZ: Have you requested how much?MR. THRONE: Well, as I say, that’s federally determined. We didn’t

request any specific amount. That’s determined by OCS, the Office of Community Services and the President of the United States.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, now I’ll ask you my question. The Governor and Senator Feinstein sent a letter for a certain amount. What was that?

MR. THRONE: Yes, well, the letter that they sent requested that the whole $101 million which is part of the Emergency Contingency Fund of LIHEAP, be released. They didn’t request a specific amount to the State of California, if I’m hearing your question correctly.

SENATOR FLOREZ: You’re completely losing me. Let me go through this slowly.

MR. THRONE: I have the letter.SENATOR FLOREZ: No, no, it’s not the letter. It’s how the program

works. So, I’m sorry you have to take me through this. So we send a letter in asking for these dollars.

MR. THRONE: One hundred and one million to be released.SENATOR FLOREZ: To be released, and how much is in the program

totality.MR. THRONE: In the Emergency Contingency Fund there’s $101 million.

In the whole LIHEAP program, there’s about $2.1 billion. And I tried to explain—SENATOR FLOREZ: I gotcha, okay.MR. THRONE: So the ECF is separate than—SENATOR FLOREZ: I am acronym challenged. So, ECF is what?MR. THRONE: Emergency Contingency Fund which is part of, and I

apologize for the acronyms, which is part of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

SENATOR FLOREZ: What is the likelihood of us getting $100 million, let’s get to that.

MR. THRONE: For the whole United States?SENATOR FLOREZ: The Governor’s request—MR. THRONE: I really can’t comment on what President Bush is going to

do, but I think it is, it’s good. That’s the most intelligent answer I can give.SENATOR FLOREZ: And when do you think that we would expect those

funds?

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MR. THRONE: I do not know the answer to that. That would be up to the Administration.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Have we ever done this before?MR. THRONE: As I said, I’ve been on the job for 26 days.SENATOR FLOREZ: Well, you should know this ____.MR. THRONE: Yeah. This money, as I said, has been released in prior

years. I’m familiar with ’05 and’04 whether it was California or all the governors in the United States that requested that, I really don’t know.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. We’ll need to do some more research on that. Okay, thank you.

MR. THRONE: So, anyway, just to clarify that one. Now if I may, Mr. Chairman, get into what CSD has done to respond to this crisis within the parameters of the federal programs we run. We immediately issued, and I heard some word about this, tips to stay cool this summer. And that went to all 80 of our grantees. It was on our website. It was on the Department of Aging website. It received considerable media coverage. I have copies of this to you. You probably have seen it. We did that immediately.

Number two, as I mentioned, we initiated with the Governor’s office and CHSS the letter that the Governor wrote to President Bush for the release of the $100 million ECF. I might add here that ECF has additional flexibility in its expenditures than the regular LIHEAP program has. Number three, we as a state department extended flexibilities in our LIHEAP program. We allowed cooling devices and generators to be purchased and the people from Riverside County can talk more on this. We’ve modified benefit levels to prevent disconnections and we allowed costs for transportation outreach, etcetera, within our grantee network.

Number four, I might add that some of the providers and some of the associations of the providers like the Access Association that represents many Southern California and Bay Area energy deliverers have requested to the CPUC to allow certain flexibilities and have also requested that a hearing such as this take place before the CPUC.

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Back to what CSD has done—we have encouraged our grantees to do outreach and they have done that during the heat wave to shelters and 46 of our grantees do, in fact, operate homeless and youth in safe haven type shelters. We’ve encouraged them to outreach hotels, senior facilities, public facilities, etcetera. And they have done that and inquired on the low income clients. Again, we provided access to transportation for the vulnerable clients. We’ve also convened ad hoc committees of our grantees of service providers. We met in San Diego with our providers and went over all of the above.

I might add, you know, as long as we’re talking about LIHEAP, and this is an important point, the LIHEAP formula is an old one. It’s based upon 1990 census data. It heavily, as the professor stated, it heavily weighs toward cold weather states. And case in point is New York State with less population than California receives far more money than the State of California. While warm weather crises is being talked about now, the formulas for this money, again, favor cold weather states. We have, with a new formula that takes into consideration new census data takes in consideration warm weather states, we have figured out that California would receive $25 million more than it presently receives. Also, our network has drafted correspondence to the California Congressional legislation to hopefully look at this formula.

As mentioned, LIHEAP serves 215,000 annually. Again, that’s about a seven percent penetration rate. We are 12-15 percent with the new PVEA money. And last but not least, CSD sponsored educational workshops in of which approximately 10,000 people attended, and we funded these prior to the heat wave to determine energy savings of these programs. So I’d be happy to answer any questions.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. I think we’ll go through the panel and then we’ll ask the general questions. Thank you for joining us.

MS. MARIA JUAREZ: Thank you. Maria Juarez, Deputy Director of Community Action Partnership, Riverside County. Also I’m a member of the Low-Income Oversight Board, PUC.

I’m going to go quickly through just some of the things that I wanted to present, and I think some of it has already been discussed, but I feel it is

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important that I go ahead and mention it. This is more a community approach to dealing with the extreme heat. In 2001 our agency, Community Action, developed an energy task force to respond to the energy crisis in the state and also to look at how it was going to impact the low-income population. That task force grew, there’s representatives from local elected officials, from emergency services, from the fire department, so it’s a well-coordinated group. But, it also provides guidance and direction in terms of policy and priorities both to our governing board, our Community Action Commission, our board of supervisors, and the Department as a whole as to services provided.

They are also the administrators of our summer energy crisis response plan which was put together by this task force and it’s our way of dealing with the heat crisis situation in Riverside County. And it has various components. That plan has been in existence since 2001. Some of the things that we’ve implemented over the years have been cool centers. In 2001 we started with five sites. Today, 2006, we have 26 sites that we fund directly, that we operate directly with. We have partnered with Edison who has another 13 sites, and also the City of Riverside has come on board with nine additional sites. They’ve opened their park and recreation facilities as cool centers. So the idea is spreading, the concept is spreading.

With this heat crisis, the sites opened up early. At the end of 2005 we had almost 8,700 individuals had attended, participated in a cool center county wide. With this heat crisis, and let me back up a little bit. We define, this task force has defined the summer months of July through October. Those are the critical months that we ask those that are coming on board as cool centers, those are the months we want them to focus on. Already in 2006 we’ve had over 3,000 individuals participating and attending cool centers, so we are expecting well over 10,000 if not higher by the end of this summer, summer season.

Additionally, other components of our summer crisis plan is we have distributed over 200 generators to low income seniors and disabled individuals who have medical equipment, that require medical equipment. The generators provided to them as a back up source of energy in the event that there is a

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blackout, and it becomes their property. We ask them for a donation if they want to. Any donations that they give goes toward scholarships to those individuals because a lot of our seniors don’t want to accept anything for nothing. And we don’t want to put them in that situation. And so the scholarship program kind of works well for them even if it’s a dollar, you know, it helps them.

We’ve also distributed almost 800 portable air units. These air units were focused in the migrant and seasonal farm workers out in the Coachella Valley area for individuals that had no form of air conditioning. So we’ve done almost 800 of those. Along with that as you go through, you know, lessons learned, one of the things we also did which fits into our plan was to help better prepare some of the farm workers, migrant and seasonal farm workers, is very, you know, they move a lot, and it’s difficult for them to keep all their documents in one location. And as a result, many times because they lack the documents, they’re not eligible for services. You have to provide documents. So we’ve provided them with a simple thing of a portfolio folder to keep all their documents in. We did the same thing when we participated in responding to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in Riverside County. The simple thing of a portfolio where they could begin to gather and keep all their documents was one of the most important things to them. And again, it’s a simple thing, but it does provide them access, education again, keep all your documents together so that you can access some of these services.

We’ve also provided, I know earlier someone mentioned security is an issue with our elderly. They don’t want to open up their doors. They’re afraid to open up the front door. It’s dark. We’ve provided some solar powered security lights for our elderly in high crime areas so that they can begin to open up their windows. They have some light available so that they’re just not locked in the home.

We’ve been distributing emergency evacuation first aid kits. They’re little packets. We call them camp packs. We’ve done probably close to 6,000 of those in joint effort with the fire department. And this really surfaced when we had wildfires out in Riverside County. I know I certainly could have used a

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particle mask when I was across the street from the fires. And they have water packets, they have those breakable lights so you’ve got some light, some minor first aid equipment. It’s just a small packet. It’s distributed at resource fairs. Again, we partner with the fire department and we rely on them to distribute it for us.

So as you see, the programs that I’m explaining, there’s a lot of partnerships. And if I may add, the cool centers—the State Community Services and Development has provided us some discretionary funding for some of these, for all these projects, actually. Cool centers, however, are the majority of the effort there is all in-kind. These are community partners that we’ve been working with over the years on a variety of programs that have stepped up to the plate and have opened up their facilities to provide these services.

We’ve also, this year, realized another problem. With this heat wave, we had a rash of calls. We had about 20 calls within a day and a half period, all of them elderly and disabled individuals seeking assistance. Their air units had gone out. They weren’t, you know, their evaporative cooler was not working properly with high humidity. The average age was in the high 70s. And we had a difficult time responding to these crisis calls for various reasons. We issued the calls out immediately to our subcontractors. Our assessors, our inspectors tried to walk them through to make sure, you know, it wasn’t something else that maybe could be trouble shoot. Our subcontractors were dropping what they could, you know, their regular work to get out to some of these emergency calls. We found a shortage of supplies in terms of air units, you know, access to them was difficult. We were trying to buy additional portable units and again, zero supply. We, because many of them could not stay in their homes, they had to go stay with a neighbor, they had to go stay with a family member, so that the coordination of getting out to their home to look at their unit to see what we could do, repair, replace, we couldn’t find them home. And so it was frustration on everyone’s part.

We partnered, we have been partnering with Edison Company on this pilot project of providing portable air units. Edison responded immediately to our request for assistance because we couldn’t find units. We were able to get a

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few units out. They’ve all been deployed. Here’s a picture of our very first one that got out there as you can see. A very happy person. Her and her husband had been without air the whole weekend. Her husband was blind, on insulin. They had been requesting assistance and hadn’t been able to get anyone to respond. So immediately upon receipt of the unit, we got that out immediately.

Our calls for generators have increased. There’s sporadic blackouts in a lot of the desert areas due to weather, due to a lot of things. And a lot of the elderly are frightened. You know, they have medical equipment. They’re afraid, you know, what am I going to do. My husband is on oxygen. You know, we don’t have a back up unit tank. So getting a unit out to them, calming them down and providing a lot of education. You know, they should have a back up unit, and things that they don’t know. Someone’s got to take the time and talk with them about it.

In addition to just getting people to the cool centers, there’s education, there’s access to resources. A lot of the resources that were mentioned by the utility companies, we administer a lot of that. We work closely with the utility companies and we do those applications, CARE, we talk about Flex Your Power, we talk about, you know, helpful tips on how to stay cool, how to stay safe within your home in extreme weather.

Again, I can’t reemphasize enough the importance of partnerships. You know, our efforts in Riverside County are being done with minimal dollars. However, I don’t want to minimize the importance of the fact that resources are needed to expand these type of programs. These are agencies, again, that we have years and years and years of working relationship. Without their help, we could not administer all our services. We are a very small staff of under 40 and we cover the full county. However, we have partnerships galore that step forward and volunteer their time and also help us to administer our programs. When you talk about outreach, there’s no better outreach approach than dealing with your community-based organizations and your faith-based organizations.

We’ve expanded our outreach clinics. We’ve been doing this for years. We actually pack up our office and we go out there. We have—when I say clinic, we also administer the LIHEAP program, the utility assistance program. We also

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administer utility assistance programs for two other private utility companies. And we actually pack up our bags, portable unit and we go out to them. We have over 55 clinics a month. That is scheduled hours. They’re usually there from 10-1, 10-4. Sometimes it’s 4-8 at night to accommodate especially in the desert area, your working families.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, let’s focus a little bit more on ____.MS. JUAREZ: I’m going to go to my recommendations and best

practices.SENATOR FLOREZ: Yes.MS. JUAREZ: I recommend that the focus on heat be year round. You

know, it’s a change, it’s a mind set change. You hear about New York, you hear about Chicago. They have those periods of heat. But, in Riverside County, you know, we have it all the time. It’s not uncommon for October to have three digit numbers there. You know, 128 degrees was, you know, out in Palm Springs area. So it’s a mind set change. Resources, funding to support some of these efforts on a community level are needed. The weatherization, our utility assistance programs, the expansion of them. More money is needed in order to meet those needs. Looking at the policies within those programs to ensure that air units are installed in every home. It is not a luxury. It is a necessity in this area.

Dialogue like this is important. I think it needs to continue. Again, I’d also like to recommend that you include community action agencies in this task force. We’ve been in the area, you know, over 40 years and we have first-hand knowledge of working in the community. Again, this is just an example of a community-based approach to dealing with heat.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. And when you say that, are you saying that the community-based aren’t on the task force at this point in time?

MS. JUAREZ: I’m not sure who is on the task force. SENATOR FLOREZ: I didn’t see them, so we’ll make sure about that, but

I think it’s a good suggestion. Very good suggestion. Well thank you very much. I appreciate that. Okay.

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MS. JOAN GRAHAM: Good afternoon, my name is Joan Graham. I’m with Community Resource Project which is also a LIHEAP provider and a community-based organization here in Sacramento County. We also serve Sutter and Yuba Counties. We’ve been in existence a long time. I’ve been there for almost 20 years. And it seems like, you know, we react always, all of us do, to crises. When the floods occurred in Sacramento and Sutter and Yuba Counties in the mid-90s, we first did a disaster plan. And it’s evolved over the years. This is the first time we’ve really dealt with it in terms of heat. But, we already had a plan in place on how to react and how to serve our clients the best. But, we do receive LIHEAP funding from CSD and, but we also administer the WIC program which is Women, Infants and Children. And again, that’s nutrition education, so between energy education and nutrition education, we are out there. We see 6-8,000 families every month in our offices and we have seven offices throughout the three counties.

So there are a lot of ways that we’re communicating and able to deal with the families who are in need of service. However, we also decided with this heat that we needed to work on that side of a disaster plan and to that end, we’ve already begun meeting with some of our local city, other CBOs that are here in Sacramento, Sutter and Yuba counties to see if we can gather information. One of the things that we heard during this last heat crisis is that there were cooling centers, but we had clients calling who didn’t know how to access them. They didn’t know where they were and it was hard to find locations. And they wanted to know about transportation. And what we found is that we could use our LIHEAP funds to provide transportation. We have vans, we have weatherization crews, so we were able to transport people. But, again, it was a communication issue and I think that gathering information like this at a state level is fine. We also need to be sure to do it at a community level.

The other, one of the other things that we found is that gathering materials is very important. We have generators. We’ve had them for a long time that we loan to people when they have energy crises and then until the energy crises can be resolved, particularly for those who are on life support. We also have evaporative coolers that we give to people whose air conditioning has

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gone out and in the winter we use portable heaters until we can get their units fixed. And we have crews that go out and actually do the repairs, but, you know, sometimes particularly here, we found we had way too many people whose air conditioners didn’t work, more than our crews could handle. So it took a couple weeks to get to everybody. But, at least we had the equipment. We want to stockpile more equipment, because we found that we were really juggling in order to make sure that everybody had the equipment that they needed. So, and yet when we went to the stores to go buy more, then everybody was out, because of course, everybody needed them, so this is something we now know we need to stockpile more of.

One of the other issues, and I’m not sure it’s been touched on today, we found that we had a good supply of water, bottled water. And when we would go out to clients’ homes to make sure that they were okay, a lot of them just didn’t have enough water and weren’t taking care of that hydration issue. We did, a part of this was through the WIC program, because they are trying to emphasize they want moms to make sure that they’re staying hydrated and so are babies. Babies are affected very much like elderly in a heat crisis. They don’t have all of the ability to retain water and so their illnesses are more dehydration than anything else during a heat crisis. So we were taking the water out to people, as well. And knowing where these stockpiles are, where we can get additional materials is also very important.

But, one of the other things that we’re talking about, too, some of the local agencies is sharing employees, because when we have a crisis, we need to have additional people out maybe going to SROs or going to check on seniors. We aren’t always able to deploy all of the, our employees or we don’t have enough employees to deploy in the ways we need to. And if we had agreements with other agencies, CBOs like ourselves, that we could share employees in crises whether it be we take on some of theirs or they take on—

Then we also, then we are also looking at this from an audit standpoint, because community based organizations are also audited. So when you’re looking at all of this, some flexibility in rules and regulations and when we can not just suspend them, but at least show some wiggle room, we would like to

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encourage that that be part of one of the things that you look at is making sure that we do have flexibilities to expend monies in a way that’s different, but definitely needed at a particular crisis time. Thank you.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you. MS. BENGYEL: I’m Kristin Bengyel. I’m representing the California

Association of Public Authorities. We’re the 327,000 providers that are in all the low-income and the disabled houses throughout California. I’m also a resident of Fresno City and County and that’s my particular responsibility. However, I am also the vice president for the region which is Tulare, Kings, Kern, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, all the counties that are in the region that you were talking about.

We are the first responders. We’re the daily responders to these populations, so we see when there is a heat crisis coming, we already know who the residents are. We know how they’re going to be affected. We apply those kinds of care. Of the 26 documented fatalities in Fresno County, not one of those people was an IHSS recipient, because those providers are in those homes every day. We have the ability at a discounted rate because we are federally, state, and county funded, to offer those kind of services that are necessary in crisis. However, we do commit fraud if we do that. We’re crooks, because it’s an unapproved service. So we already have a registry as a resource. We already have the funding at a diminished rate. We’re already there on site as first responders.

We had in Fresno County when the social workers who have 350 clients per social worker, we have one person per client. So when the social workers were calling, we’d already been there and we already had an electronic telephone system within the public authority that had direct dialing to all of these names, numbers, addresses, that is downloaded throughout a state system through the CMET system. So preparation wise, we’re already there. We can be, we are educated in that we take the training to make sure that we’re aware of what is necessary for the clients every day. And through this education, then, you don’t have the police that have to go out to these homes. You don’t need the day-to-day. You don’t need the fire people. You don’t clog up the emergency rooms, because we’re there. We’re already there.

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SENATOR FLOREZ: And in terms of the funding for all of you that, what is the funding source for those types of collaborations and sharing? I mean, is that public? How does it work in terms of your funding sources?

MS. BENGYEL: In our funding source, the In Home Supportive Services is 50 percent federally funded and then the remaining 50 percent for approved tasks is 35 percent state funded, and then the county shares in the remainder of that. So what it breaks down to on a net county cost is about 17 and a half percent, which is a diminished rate from, and in Fresno County, that’s an $8.15 wage. So it’s a discounted service for excellent care.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, others? Yes.MS. GRAHAM: Our funding source for the LIHEAP program DOE, PBA,

and we also receive monies from DHS through the WIC program. But that also is a federal grant.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay.MR. THRONE: That’s all federally funded. SENATOR FLOREZ: It’s all federally funded.MS. GRAHAM: (Yes)SENATOR FLOREZ: Is there room for state funding in these structures?MS. GRAHAM: Actually, PBA money is state money. And the, I believe

that there are other, some of the CBOs also have state funded programs. We don’t happen to other than PBA. But, I also would like to say that again, the network that LIHEAP providers works with all of the utility companies, as well, in order to make these payments, utility payments on behalf of the clients. So there is a system already working that has done this before in the energy crisis. There was a state funding to CSD to fund or assist people with the utility payments.

MR. THRONE: The beautiful thing about LIHEAP is the CBOs, our grantees, are locally controlled. They all have local boards. Most of their boards are tri-part type in terms of the community action agencies that run LIHEAP and DOE programs. And they’re made up of one-third public officials, one-third low-income themselves, and one-third private sector. I mentioned from the beginning that I’ve been on the job 26 days. Prior to that, I was one of those

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CBOs. I was director of the Redwoods Community Action Agency. And Senator Chesbro was on my board of directors. So, it is a locally controlled program and that’s one of the beauties of if. All of the local grantees operate in various partnerships dependent upon their local area.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Thank you all, very much.MS. BENGYEL: Could I mention one more other thing, because you

brought it up, Senator Florez. You had a question in regards to rural clients and transportation. And many of the care providers currently drive or can drive a recipient’s car. So you have transportation issues that are also matched. If there were an ability to free up some of the $2 billion that you had recognized as available, it would possibly be to cover the emergency service portion. The tasks that they do on a regular basis are covered by the additional funding that I mentioned. But, any emergency services that they might provide in the home and/or including transportation would not be covered by any of these unless there was legislation that would promote a trigger of some kind that would say, okay, this is an emergency situation. And these in-home care providers can provide transportation and care during this period of time. And that would be a very good use of time, or of funds because then your emergency personnel statewide would not have to respond to these individuals.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you very much. Okay, move on to—I know Carl’s still here. Dave Helmsin’s here I see. And then Bruce Lee, the president-elect, EMS. Thank you for being patient. We appreciate it. Just your, maybe starting with Carl, your overall thoughts. And obviously as we start to think about new heat response systems, maybe your input in terms of what you think we ought to be doing.

MR. CARL WOOD: With your permission, Mr. Chairman, initially I’ll stick to my outline and I’d be happy to respond to questions. Some of them may go outside of my role here as a representative of AARP, because my background, so I’ll try to distinguish that.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Oh, that’s okay.MR. WOOD: Senators, it was an unnecessary tragedy that so many

Californians died in the summer’s heat wave. AARP would like to thank Senator

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Florez for calling this hearing and we hope that it will be followed by a thorough investigation and analysis by the state government of what happened and how to prevent heat related deaths in the future.

I think it’s also to be noted that your invitation of Professor Klinenberg and his testimony is an extremely valuable and thoughtful contribution to the analysis of this event and what we can do in the future. And I would like to associate our organization with all of his recommendations.

It appears that a large number of victims were elderly, many of them low-income. We suspect that many residents whose age and health status puts them at risk either did not have home air conditioning or were reluctant to run it for fear of unaffordable electricity bills. Electric and gas utilities are in a strong position to provide solutions because of their recurring contact with consumers, and the long-standing policies and funding mechanisms embedded in state statutes and Public Utility Commission regulations. They can and should dispel the apparently widespread notion that elderly and low-income residents necessarily face a cruel choice between air conditioning and other necessities. But, existing utility programs are incompletely implemented.

First, automatic enrollment in utility bill discount programs, that is CARE--despite aggressive and partially successful efforts spurred by Senator Escutia’s SB 580, nearly 25 percent of eligible customers statewide remain unenrolled in programs that can save them at least 20 percent and up to 40 percent off their electric bill. CPUC efforts to approach 100 percent enrollment of eligible customers have been frustrated by lack of cooperation from other state agencies. AARP has long championed 100 percent enrollment under this very important program.

Second, cool centers—Edison has reinstated its program and expanded it to some extent, but it still must be considered pilot in scope. It approaches more complete coverage in Riverside County, but frankly throughout Edison’s service territory it really is a pilot program still to the extent it even exists. The problem of transporting vulnerable residents to the centers must be effectively addressed. Several presenters today have testified to that effect, and I think

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this is a key weakness of the existing cool center programs almost everywhere that they exist.

PG&E doesn’t even have such a utility program. I believe the same is also true for San Diego Gas and Electric. A number of municipals have similar type of programs, some cities and other entities run cool center programs, but they do not come near to meeting the need for such very important programs and programs that could be much more important if they were effectively implemented with transportation, with adequate programmatic aspects at the cool centers themselves.

Third, low-income weatherization programs which in California are the most extensive in the nation still fall well short of the need and are not specifically adapted to address heat related issues, particularly in multi-family dwelling buildings. New programs should be considered and implemented on an expedited basis. First assure that the Department of Health and Human Services is fully engaged in CARE enrollment efforts. Anything that you can do to prod them to cooperate with the Public Utilities Commission to overcome issues dealing with federal privacy legislation would be extremely helpful. There are many programs under which people are income qualified and to the extent that the CPUC and the state government can work together to get those people automatically enrolled in the CARE program, it would be a tremendous benefit and reach many hundreds of thousands of people who are not presently covered but who are eligible.

Second, establish portable air conditioner and appliance programs to respond to emergency situations in the dwelling. Several other witnesses have attested to the importance of this program. It is something, apparently, that Southern California Edison wants to advance. I think all of the utilities can do this and it makes a lot of sense to implement this through the utilities among other agencies.

Third, use in-home support services workers and other community-based organizations and workers to improve communication with the elderly and vulnerable residents in their homes. All the appropriate agencies of the state government should be involved in this effort. And you have heard from many of

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them, I gather, the Governor has set up a task force that I think there just has to be a comprehensive approach to this, and I think that your hearing is going to help to spur that.

Public and private caregivers must be involved in planning and implementation including local agencies, community-based organizations, health care delivery systems, and one group that I think we haven’t heard from here, but we should which is unions of service providers, which have an intimate connection with the vulnerable populations.

Going off script for a moment, two issues that have come up during this hearing today that I’d like to address very briefly—first, several of the utilities proposed that a change be made in the legislated freeze on 130 percent of baseline rates. I think that you should think long and hard before moving in that direction. This very wise legislation was established during the emergency in 2001, I guess, 2000 or 2001, and provides at least some core of electrical service to which low-income and particularly elderly residents can avail themselves. This is a zero sum game. If you loosen up that restriction, then you may reduce rates for people at the higher end of usage, but necessarily the people with lower usage have to pick that up. And I think that a more responsible approach and one that is more protective of low-income and elderly consumers would be to keep this restriction in place, but any additional funds that the state might allocate on an emergency basis, hopefully this heat wave that we experienced will not be a common, recurrent problem, can be targeted on a needs basis to assist people with unexpectedly high bills, rather than make a basic change in the present, quite progressive rate structure that California has.

Second, with regard to LIHEAP funding, and I recognize this is out of your direct jurisdiction. It’s a matter for the federal congress and the President. But, it’s certainly something that the Legislature can have some input in the LIHEAP funding should be distinguished between the eligibility for LIHEAP and the authorized level of benefits. LIHEAP is nowhere close to being fully funded. In fact, I’ve heard figures that while the current level, actually, the level since the establishment of LIHEAP which occurred in the middle ‘80s, has been at about

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$2.7 or $2.9 billion per year every single year. It simply hasn’t increased over that period of time. However, if the benefit were fully funded so that all of the eligible recipients receive the full benefit to which they are entitled under the law, I've heard figures approaching $55 billion, so it’s almost a pittance the degree to which the funding occurs. This year there was an advance of $1 billion. It was authorized, but that I think is against the following fiscal year’s allocation. So without additional legislation, then it’s just going to be borrowing against a credit card in effect.

Maybe more importantly for California or at least as importantly, the formula under which LIHEAP money is allocated to states is set up so that when funding is at this low level as has occurred currently, states that are considered warm states like California get proportionately a much lower proportion of the funds than do other states. And so to the extent that LIHEAP funding nationally is increased, it will result in a proportionately higher allocation to California than the state currently experiences. And with the proposal earlier this year to extend or to advance some of the LIHEAP funding by $1 billion, I was rather startled to see that a number of members of the California delegation voted against that, which is pretty shocking to me. But, hopefully some advance can be made in this area. This LIHEAP funding has been a national priority of AARP as well as virtually every consumer group that is concerned with the interests of low-income people

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for your indulgence.SENATOR FLOREZ: And so the formula that was produced in 2001 from

your vantage point is sufficient?MR. WOOD: The 130 percent? Well, if by formula you mean the entire

tiered structure.SENATOR FLOREZ: Yeah, the structure.MR. WOOD: That’s something I was involved in, of course, and it’s

something that I’m personally very proud of. It’s, I think, both a very progressive structure from an economic viewpoint, and it also helps to encourage conservation. Necessarily there are distortions in it and a lot of this comes from simply the extremely high rates that California now has as a result

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of the detritus of deregulation that we are going to have to cope with for years to come.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Let me delve into the PUC kind of side issue for a moment. Is there a role for the PUC in the declaration of an emergency in terms of providing some sort of—Senator Bowen and I had this very quick discussion on a role of the PUC and I'm just wondering is that from your vantage point useful?

MR. WOOD: I listened to your questions to some of the other witnesses and the PUC has a hard time dealing with emergencies in real time simply because the PUC’s processes require a fair amount of time even during the extreme emergency of the energy crisis it was very difficult to move anything very quickly. I think, I gather, of course I’m not a member anymore, but I gather that there’s an interest among some commissioners in taking another look at the tiered structure and perhaps making some alterations in that, and of course, that’s completely within their purview unless they get some different direction from the Legislature.

I think that if the Legislature were to allocate emergency funds, then, and give some general guidance as to how they were to be allocated, I think that the PUC could in a reasonable amount of time, direct the utilities as far as the details, how those were to be assigned. And I think that particularly with regard to my suggestion about dealing with high bills that are not a regular occurrence and perhaps providing some emergency assistance to low-income residential customers. That there might be an important role here for the PUC.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Thank you. Very much appreciate that. Okay.

MR. BRUCE LEE: Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. My name is Bruce Lee and I’m the representative here today from the Emergency Medical Services Administrators Association of California. I am also a member of the State Commission on Emergency Medical Services, and I’m now a new member of the Governor’s Heat Emergency Task Force. My regular job, I am the director of Emergency Medical Services for the County of Santa Clara.

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Again, thank you very much for the invitation to testify in front of your committee on this very, very important and timely topic. I think what I will do for the sake of your agenda and flow of testimony here, I will deviate significantly from my prepared remarks and really just hit the highlights and focus in on the recommendations, because otherwise it will just be too redundant.

First of all, as my title reflects and my background, I am representing the interests of the emergency medical services group which are the private and public sector paramedics, EMTs, working in our communities as well as the emergency departments and trauma services. And as you already well know in your work, EMS and emergency departments, many of them are already very much overwhelmed and inundated with patients in different areas of our state. But, they remain very resilient. They have a certain amount of reserve capacity. Not a lot, but a certain amount of reserve capacity, and they are very, very flexible. However, in a case of a heat emergency when you have many types of patients and some quite frankly, non-patients, but people in need of assistance coming into the emergency system, it does act to quickly overwhelm and stretch their capacities beyond the resources that they have. So this potentially is a very serious situation. We ran into it to a degree in the San Jose area, probably not as bad as in other areas. But, in this case, my first recommendation is that we need to do whatever we can to protect the integrity, the functioning of our emergency medical services systems, because there’s not a lot of excess capacity.

And as listening to the testimony here today from a number of the other professionals, it comes to mind that there’s a lot of analogy here to the work that we’re doing for the influenza pandemic. Now, the influenza pandemic we hope does not occur at least to the degree that it did in 1918 with the Spanish flu, and the heat emergency just has occurred and has taken a number of lives. But there are many, many similarities in terms of grassroots community response, making sure people do not become patients themselves, prevention, communication, all of those things that are very important. And so I’m hopeful that we can take a lot of the money that has been allocated from the federal

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government, the state government, the Governor’s office recently for other forms of hazard emergency response such as the flu pandemic and slightly shift that and use the synergies that we have to rapidly modify our heat specific response capabilities.

The other thing I wanted to mention, two of the things I wanted to mention deal with vulnerable populations. Vulnerable populations are again, a group of individuals, of people that we are very concerned about in other forms of emergency planning such as the flu pandemic. They typically are under the radar screen. We may not know where they are, who they are, and I believe that the most vulnerable of the vulnerable populations are the ones that will not be able to get into the resources such as the cooling centers and other services that are being set up in our communities. So even though I think the cooling centers are a very, very important concept to local emergency preparedness and operations, in fact, they’re going to be necessary, but I think we’re going to have to put more focus on finding the vulnerable populations, the elderly, the disabled, the people that will not be mobile, that will not be able to access these services and that will in fact die unless we find them first. These are also the people that at least in our jurisdiction ended up being transported to the emergency department via ambulance and quite frankly, they weren’t really patients, but we couldn’t leave them there where they were. So, we didn’t have the appropriate and at that time, safety net services set up for them. So that’s a very, very important area and again, we need to prevent people from becoming patients and casualties if we can from fast responding front end work.

Another point of emphasis, again getting back to grassroots emergency preparedness deals with an old OES program called the CERT program—Community Emergency Response Teams. And I think just as we’re planning for the flu pandemic, we realize that in an emergency heat emergency that government resources will go fast and we will not be able to provide everything to everybody. So grassroots, self help programs, and again modifying these old fashioned civil defense era programs that were at that point defined as the CERT teams, Community Emergency Response Teams for self help, checking on

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neighbors, checking on one another, making sure that they’re okay, and then having community leads to coordinate this is very important.

My last recommendation for your committee is I do believe that we may have an area here needing not just money, but some new regulation that deals with how long-term care facilities, skilled nursing facilities, but I’m really focusing in on some of the smaller board and care, long-term care facilities that I’m personally not familiar with the regulatory process that they have to go through. But, we did see in our area that in some cases, they were not able to respond and mitigate the emergency. Some of them, in fact, were throwing up their arms, but you know, thank goodness they did call 911, but I think that it’s an area that we need to explore to make sure that if these board and care centers are going to have the responsibility to care for individuals that cannot care for themselves, they need to have basic emergency response plans. They need to have evacuation plans. They need to be ready for a heat emergency and have the ability to call in resources to augment their cooling systems or heating systems, whatever they need. And it’s just, it’s something that we touched on in our area, but I think it’s an area of vulnerability, but we should look at what we require under licensure or not for these centers that are caring for individuals that are going to need help. Thank you.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you. And in terms of your participation in the task force, what is at the end of the day that you are going to bring to the group?

MR. LEE: Well, we’re just in our early stages of formation, but I’m going to try to bring in for my perspective everything that we can do to make sure that we do not increase the patient population in our ambulances, with our paramedics, in our emergency departments. And I’m going to try to promote early intervention, early identification of vulnerable populations working with OES and if we, if our paramedics, fire service, private ambulance services, see vulnerable populations in the field, we need to have the communication set up and the trigger mechanism set up to identify them, pass that information on so proper actions can be taken. I think that is primary.

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We’re also going to be addressing the age old issue of ambulance diversion. And whether that is important or, that’s the wrong word. It’s very important. But, whether it’s, it makes matters worse during an emergency like this.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. Okay, great. Thank you.MR. LEE: Thank you.SENATOR FLOREZ: Mr. Helmsin, thank you for joining us.MR. DAVE HELMSIN: Mr. Chair, members, my pleasure. And thanks

again for putting this together. I think it’s very meaningful discussion. I’m here for the California Association of Health Facilities which represents most of the couple thousand skilled nursing facilities, homes for the developmentally disabled and mental health facilities in California. They take care of about 200,000 people on any given day. And I guess I should differentiate. These are licensed health facilitates, so they have a very rigid requirement in their licensure for emergency preparedness and so forth. I think the earlier reference was made to community-based facilities that are licensed out of Social Services and do take some very sick patients, but have a different regulatory structure.

So in our facilities, we’ve got some very sick patients. I mean, over the years it’s become, the acuity’s been higher and higher. I mean if anybody’s been in the hospital lately, you know you get discharged as soon as they finish what they’re doing. And for an older person that means you’re likely not stable. You get discharged to a nursing facility. On the other end of the spectrum we’ve got a lot more community-based alternatives for independent living and for services in the home which means you don’t get to a nursing facility until you’ve outlived all of your capacity in the community. So we take patient care very seriously and our patients are growing sicker by the day.

We face a number of challenges related to the heat wave, certainly because of the condition of our patients temperature control is a very important element. I’m pleased to say that I think we fared pretty well over all. There were no deaths in any licensed long-term care facilities in the state. There were a couple that they thought may have been, but the coroner has ruled differently. So, what we had to do we did. I’m only aware of three evacuations that had to

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occur. One in Stockton, one in Fremont, and one in Woodland. And I believe there was a few hiccups there, but it actually worked reasonably well.

We learned two lessons, or lessons in two areas, one being communication and the other being flexibility in the regulatory agencies. I mean, the communication issue’s pretty simple. I mean the local emergency services folks were not able at all times to communicate with either the facility or the Department of Health Services who can be very helpful in these instances in finding alternative placements. So in Stockton for example, we had police cars and ambulances at the facility before the patients had been prepared. I mean, you need to put a pretty good package of medical records and medication together to send our folks anywhere. And before the Department of Health Services knew it was occurring, so by the time the Department came in, they were more or less in the way. You know, once you get a rhythm going. So we need to be a little bit better at communication.

On the flexibility side, it’s always difficult to place these patients particularly on a short notice. Many of the facilities in the community that were able to take patients didn’t have enough staff in place at that moment in time. We’ve got staffing requirements set in statute. So there was no way to take patients, even though you probably could have cared for them better than their current situation, but you couldn’t waive that piece of the regulations to get them into your facilities.

So I mean, it’s pretty simple fixes. I mean, what we need to do is get the Department of Health Services giving local emergency preparedness people more information about how to contact them right away and set up a time table. And then one other thing on regulatory flexibility—also we had equipment failures. I mean, we had people bringing in temporary equipment, replacing equipment. I mean, the systems were overtaxed, so we had a lot of repair and replacement work. The Office of Statewide Health Planning oversees that activity. They’re notoriously bureaucratic in terms of approving anything. They were also unable to waive certain things during these emergencies that would have made this a lot easier. That’s not a complaint. They did a very good job of expediting things, but they had no waiver authority.

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So I think that the fixes here are pretty simple. I mean, we step up the information between DHS and the local emergency services. And we allow both the Department of Health Services and OSHPOD to exercise some waiver authority on the regulations during times of emergency. And with that, I think we would have been even better prepared for these things.

I want to make one final comment on power and energy and rotating outages and things of that nature. In 2001 when we had that problem, on behalf of our members we went to the PUC and got a ruling that we would be classed as essential services. So for any rotating power outages, they exempted these facilities from the outages. That exemption did not, however, go down to SMUD and like Modesto Area Irrigation District and some other places—

SENATOR FLOREZ: Where did it go?MR. HELMSIN: It went to the PUC covered utility companies. But, there

are a few municipalities and other ownership arrangements for these services that were not subject to the PUC. We would need to see that essential services exemption I think extended to those folks to be prepared for a power outage in the future. And that’s our contribution today. Thank you very much.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Just before you all leave, in terms of the emergency preparedness of this endeavor, this 160 plus deaths in California, do you see this as, Dave you mentioned no deaths at least in some of these facilities, but if this had gone another week, maybe different protocols that we should have had and is this kind of a pre-emergency? I mean, I think it’s a full-blown emergency, but you know, I think the Governor’s office seemed to be saying, well, it wasn’t an emergency until the locals tells us it’s an emergency. And then Mayor Autry, I think, said correctly if they’d gone another two or three days we would all have been in a full-blown emergency. I mean, do you see that as a—is this not in that category of a rolling black out type of situation during heat, or maybe you can give us a perspective on that.

MR. HELMSIN: I would say from a facility perspective that, you know, many of these facilities are aged themselves. I mean, most of California’s bed supply in nursing homes is built in the ‘60s and ‘70s. So much of, a lot of

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upgrading has occurred over the years, but many of those systems have not been, you know, not brand new. These are MediCal facilities for a large part and the capital improvements aren’t exactly reimbursed that well. But, nonetheless, I think that they were all taxed to their maximum and in many instances, another few days would have meant many breakdowns and which cases in those particular areas you may have already used up the temporary supply of cooling equipment. You may have already gotten repairmen out there doing everything they can. You may have already exhausted parts that go out on these things. So certainly a longer term problem would be a big problem.

Same thing from our perspective on the facilities, at least the larger facilities are required to have generators. So if you’ve got a rolling power outage, a generator can kick in. But, they’re designed by law to be about a six-hour operation and to run lights. They’re not designed to run heavy duty heating and air conditioning over a multi-day period. So, if certainly more of this would have been, I think, much more challenging for us.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate. Thank you for your patience. Okay, let’s get to our ag panel. And as you’re coming up, I’m just going to run to the restroom real quick.

SENATOR VINCENT: You gentlemen don’t mind me sitting over here. Mr. Florez will be back soon, so we can get started. And identify yourself please before you make your presentation.

MR. MICHAEL MARSH: Good afternoon. My name is Michael Marsh and I’m the chief executive officer with Western United Dairymen, the largest dairy producer trade association in the western United States. We represent about 100 of the state’s 1,900 dairy families. All of the dairies within the State of California are family owned operations. Mr. Chairman—

SENATOR FLOREZ: Yes, sorry. I was trying to beat you but wasn’t successful.

SENATOR VINCENT: You went out to milk a cow. (LAUGHTER) MR. MARSH: And of course, the dairy industry in California was

impacted very significantly by the heat wave that we had during the month of July. And fortunately from our perspective, it could have been much worse, but

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for the fact that our dairy producers had been very heavily invested in different types of technology to keep their cattle cool. But, I mean, even today, well those types of technologies would be misters, soakers, fans, and different types of water types of things that help keep the cattle cool. But, even today, when you talk to some of these families who were up day and night all night, all day, with their kids, their grand kids, trying to keep their cattle alive, trying to keep the business going. It’s sets you back when you talk, they’re still very emotional about it. And I’m sure they will be into the future.

But, of course the length of the hot spell was one of the challenges. Ten to 12 days over 100 degrees, and of course, at night it didn’t cool down, so the cattle never had an opportunity to eat, to cool down, to have an opportunity to rest. And unfortunately some of these stress related issues associated with the cattle is not over. Actually, we’re still continuing to experience some additional culling from the dairy herds and that will continue into the future.

Another one of the challenges that we did experience was a lack of adequate rendering capacity within the state. On or about the 8th of July, one of the rendering facilities in Fresno County experienced some mechanical difficulties. And of course, when that occurred, following the closure of Modesto Tallow Company and settlement of litigation with the air district, San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, in January, December/January of this year, that rendering capacity was unavailable to pick up the additional dead stock and take care of that either from the poultry industry’s position or from the dairy industry’s position either. And so of course that created an issue.

At the same time, this plant in Fresno County had been trying to get an expansion and permitted for expansion with the air district for quite some time and unfortunately, that did not take place and is not taking place yet today. So they are continuing to work on that issue. Permitting of rendering plants will continue to be an issue and that needs to be resolved.

I do have to note that thankfully the Governor’s office, the Administration, the Office of Emergency Services, CDFA, and the county ag commissioners all acted very quickly, very decisively to help us in appealing to the federal

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government for federal disaster assistance. So we’re hopeful that that will come through very shortly or will be able to move ahead with that.

We won’t know the exact economic impact on our industry for several more weeks. We’re working with the county ag commissioners, our association has in compiling and assembling the data necessary to quantify appropriately those claims of losses by the farmers. Milk production today is still off about 10 percent from where it was before the heat wave. Actually Larry Serpa from Land O’Lakes probably has a little better idea what his plant is doing in Tulare. But, dairy farmers are going to be probably out another 18 months here in the state before they’re back in full production. And there has been a significant impact to the dairy economy within the state and so we’re hopeful some federal assistance will be available.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. Thank you. Let’s go on now right down the line before we get some general questions.

MR. BOCCADORO: Michael Boccadoro, today on behalf of the California Poultry Federation. Much like the dairy industry, we did have some significant implications I think as Mr. Yates testified earlier. We had about 900,000 birds die, 700,000 chickens, 200,000 turkeys in the state. Most of those, if not all of those, in the Central Valley with Fresno, Merced, and Stanislaus hardest hit by the implications. The farm gate value of those birds is around $5 million. The retail value around $15 million. But, again, by comparison to the dairy industry our financial implications were much less significant. Modern poultry operations are set up in a climate controlled operation and so we’re in a much better position to deal with it and as a result of the blackouts that occurred during the energy crisis, all of our facilities also have significant back up generation. Should the power had gone out, we would have had the ability to keep the birds climate controlled during that time period. So we are in a good position to deal with these issues, but even with that you can see how we had significant losses as a result of the extensive heat wave. Thank you.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Great. Thank you.MR. SERPA: Mr. Chairman, thank you. My name is Larry Serpa, director

of member relations for Land O’Lakes. Land O'Lakes is a dairy co-op owned by

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dairy farmers. We have operations located in Tulare and Orland, California. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for your opportunity to testify today on behalf of Land O'Lakes regarding the heat conditions that have recently hit the Central Valley region. I would like to address the impact of these dire conditions in three ways—first the impact felt by cooperative members, second, the disruption that we experienced in our operations, and third, the specific impact on the power grid.

First, our members as reported by the media the past few weeks and by others speaking today, the loss of cows and milk production has been difficult for many. We have begun to assess this exact impact on our producers and this is what we have learned so far. In some cases our producers’ death rate was because of the heat situation was increased almost five fold compared to normal times. If you’re trying to put some perspective on that, say in normal times maybe they’re losing maybe less than a half percent. This heat occurrence probably increased that to two percent plus. These death rates were probably encumbered not just milk cows, but some cases, the young stock.

In regards to milk production, 28 million pounds of lost milk production all within two and a half weeks’ period was affected on our plant facilities. In some days in that period our production was down almost 30 percent of daily input and you consider that again in revenue. Their revenue loss to the producers farm and also revenue loss to their milking, their milk plant operations that they own.

In addition, our producers have felt effects of the immense demands placed on the rendering industry. Considering the magnitude of this issue we are pleased that the state and county government were able to respond as quickly as they did providing clearance for farm disposal of carcasses. I was personally involved with some of the state and county officials as this state of emergency was arising. I took personal impact to communicate with our members to explain what the emergency guidelines would be so they were aware of this thing, because the pending health situation was definitely arising. We communicated with our website, direct emails to our producers, and also direct faxes.

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We continue to closely monitor the impacts of these issues on our member producers assessing damage already incurred, as well as monitoring how future conditions may continue to affect them, including how the loss of successful breeding and longer forced lactation cycles will impact their future milk production.

Second, I would like to address the impact on our operations. In a word we certainly experienced disruption. Our plant and Tulare facilities the last two weeks in July as temperatures soared, milk was rationed and our electricity source was disrupted. As a result, production at our facility dropped 6.4 percent from June to July and the cost of production increased dramatically. These difficulties we experienced due to lack of power could have been mitigated which brings me to the third point I would like to share today--the impact of disastrous heat waves on our energy source. Our plant in Tulare was without power for three hours on July 24. The cost of idling this plant is significant as we are then unable to cover overhead and keep up with the daily milk production that we have on hand. We participate in the I-6 interruptible rate schedule and to protect our plant from periodic interruption in power, we have invested in a six megawatt natural gas generator to use as backup. Unfortunately in many situations when temperatures and power demands soar, we are not able to use this generator without facing penalties from the California Public Utilities Commission. We believe this issue needs to be addressed. Overall, we would recommend that the state create more incentives not penalties, for customers to use alternative sources of energy on high use days.

We would further recommend that the state examine the I-6 provisions and the option for reverse metering for those customers who can supply their own power through alternative energy sources. If companies such as ours could move to an alternative energy source during high stress times such as heat waves, we could help the entire power grid maintain base levels of usage. This concludes my remarks today. We appreciate the opportunity to share these and also these impacts that were felt on our producer level at our Tulare facility and also on the power grid. Thank you.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you, Larry. Appreciate it.

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MR. TOM TALBOT: Good afternoon, my name is Tom Talbot. I am a cow-calf producer from Bishop, California, and am representing the California Cattlemen’s Association as second vice-president. I’ve also been in private veterinary practice for the past 31 years.

A significant part of my veterinary practice involves dealing with the health and wellbeing of beef cattle. It’s a real pleasure to appear before this committee to address California’s recent deadly heat wave. I’m hopeful that my comments will be meaningful in trying to put together a plan for the future should this or other similar events occur again.

It is a real honor to represent California’s beef cattle producers at this informational hearing. California’s beef cattle producers have long endured the wrath of Mother Nature. From heat waves to blizzards, from droughts to floods, one thing those of us engaged in production agriculture are constantly aware of, is that we are always at the mercy of extremes in weather conditions. Though we are not pleased about the consequences of extreme weather conditions, we understand that dealing with these situations is a fact of life. In discussing the effects of the recent heat wave on California’s beef cattle it is important to recognize that our industry is composed of two distinct types of operations, namely the cow-calf producer, and the feedlot operator.

Cow/calf producers generally operate on large parcels of open land. Cattle are turned out in large pastures and in most cases, cattle have access to shade trees and variations of topography that allow them to select areas where the heat is less intense. Though cattle in these environments are probably more uncomfortable than they might be at lower temperatures, they do not appear to suffer nearly as much as they would if they were more confined. They tend to graze in the early morning and late evenings and seek the shade in the hot parts of the day. Having spent a couple of days working cattle in the peak of the heat wave in the Bakersfield area I can attest to the fact that the heat was much harder on cowboys and veterinarians than it was on cattle.

I do not believe that cow-calf producers suffered significant losses during this time period. Though weight gains may have slowed and cattle may have

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been uncomfortable I believe death loss directly related to the high temperatures in the cow-calf segment of our industry was almost non-existent.

California’s feedlot operations were a different story. Cattle in confined areas in high production states were definitely more susceptible to the effects of heat and losses were significant to this section of the industry. Death loss as well as severe reductions in weight gains were experienced by most feedlot operations. As most feedlot operations are in the warmer areas of California, operators have long taken precautions to deal with heat. Shades and sprinklers are commonplace in most feedlots. Diets are adjusted to reduce the amount of heat generated by the body during the warmer times of the year. The fact that feedlot operations showed losses greater than normal just substantiates how extreme these temperatures really were. Not only were the day time highs extreme, but the night time lows were also incredibly high preventing cattle from getting a chance to cool down in the evening.

When weather events deviate so drastically from the norm it is almost impossible to prepare for the ramifications during the event itself. Whether it be a Hurricane Katrina where the intensity of the winds were unlike anything ever seen before, or a heat wave where temperatures skyed to new records beating old ones by several degrees, it is virtually impossible to have predicted the devastation either of these events would have afflicted on both human and animal populations.

Having gone through the recent heat wave, it is highly likely that those most affected will evaluate what steps they can take to minimize their losses the next time something like this occurs. Economics will play a big role in these decisions. It is difficult to spend huge numbers of dollars to remedy a problem that may not occur again for many more years. The desire to be well-prepared will definitely be dictated by economic reality.

Knowing that our industry will do what it can to minimize the consequences of an event like this in the future, the real reason we are here today is to try to make recommendations so the government will be more effective. Knowing that government has no control over how hot it might get or how cold it might get or how deep the snow might become, it appears the

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government’s role is in being prepared and having plans in place to deal with ramifications of disasters.

In this case the ramifications of this disaster meant what to do with increased numbers of dead carcasses. Though this may not be a pleasant subject to talk about, it is an area where planning and preparation will pay big dividends if catastrophic losses of livestock ever happen in this state. Whether it is loss due to extreme weather related events or catastrophic disease outbreaks, the potential to have to dispose of dead animals in much larger numbers than seen during the recent heat wave is real.

As we saw during the heat wave, rendering plants were overwhelmed both because of insufficient capacity and because of system malfunctions at critical times. Government should be sensitive to the importance of this industry and do what is necessary to encourage adequate rendering capacity throughout the entire state. Fortunately California has in place a set of emergency animal disposal guidelines developed and approved by the California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. These guidelines are to be used when rendering capability is exceeded and there’s a declaration of emergency either at the local or state level. These guidelines provide alternative methods of disposal such as temporary storage of carcasses for transport to rendering, disposal at permitted landfills, on-site composting, and on-site burial.

Several counties in the areas most severely affected by the heat wave had plans in place to effectively utilize these guidelines. They were able to declare emergency status that allowed alternative methods of disposal to occur immediately. Other counties were not as well prepared. In the event a situation arises where catastrophic numbers of animals need to be disposed of, it will be imperative that all counties are prepared to respond immediately. Not only will they need to be prepared to declare emergency status, but will have identified large areas of land that will permit alternative disposal options.

The state has done a good job of planning for a crisis but it is imperative that each county in the state follow through with the plan so they’re ready to act immediately should a crisis arise. Thank you for the opportunity to testify here

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today. I am hopeful that because of hearings like today, we will be just a little bit better prepared in the future.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, great. Just a question for all of you. How confident are you that we’re going to get the funding from the federal government? How’s that conversation going? I know the Secretary of Ag went back to Washington. Is that productive?

MR. MARSH: To the best of our knowledge, yes. There are two different components, Senator. One, of course, is livestock disaster assistance program that is available through USDA. That program probably will not be that difficult for our producers to access in light of the catastrophe we’ve had in the state. The second part which is going to be more difficult is going to be the compensation for loss in milk production which is going to go out 18 months. That probably will take some appropriations at the federal level in order for us to move that. So we are working with the members of Congress to see that we can get that achieved.

SENATOR FLOREZ: And then the on-site composting question I think I’ve heard a couple times here. That means the ability for cattle owners to bury on site?

MR. MARSH: No. SENATOR FLOREZ: What is on-site composting?MR. MARSH: Actually the guidelines that came out from CalEPA were at

first of course, you attempt to go to rendering. Secondly, if you couldn’t go to rendering, go to approved land fill. Third, if you’re unable to do the prior two, you can compost on site, on your dairy. You can’t take it to a composting facility and compost with other materials. And then of course, the last one would be burial. So composting is different than burial.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay, and the regs on that process are?MR. MARSH: On which?SENATOR FLOREZ: Burial.MR. MARSH: That’s your last resort and many of the counties it wasn’t

even allowed. I know Stanislaus County that wasn’t allowed. Actually, Stanislaus County only allowed as an alternative taking to a certified land fill.

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But, unfortunately there was some miscommunication in some of the media based upon interviews they did with some other folks, other agricultural groups that unfortunately may have led to some producers composting. But, we and the state CDFA, were very aggressive in trying to get that information out to producers as best we could.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay.MR. SERPA: Yes, Senator, again, I take responsibility on our producers

when this thing was coming down that we had direct communication to our producers and in some cases, phone calls, but directly emails and I was on our website. So this information and the specific guidelines were illustrated there, so they knew that. And also, naturally, we tell them to check with their ag commissioners if there is any other such recommendations.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Okay. Great. Just in general, what should we—obviously the facilities were built a generation ago, the rolling blackouts helped a bit. You mentioned some of the facilities being built for these types of weather resistant, but in the event this had gone on another week, do you feel that we were adequately prepared, or is it more to do from a heat perspective. And the Governor’s task force is delving into that. We’re happy about that. But, you know, are you having input in terms of those particular questions?

MR. MARSH: We will continue to have input into those issues. Of course, I think a good point that Mr. Serpa raised was on alternative energy and the development, the need to develop alternative energy sources, not just for his milk processing plant, but also how we might be able to use agricultural sources to enhance renewable energy within the State of California.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you all. Thanks for waiting around, too. I appreciate it. Yes, Senator Vincent.

SENATOR EDWARD VINCENT: I just want to say a thing. I was quiet the whole time. I never said anything. I wouldn’t have said anything now until I got this note from my wife, you know. But what I wanted to say especially at the last moment you come up and talk about the dairy situation. Well, you know, my situation with Iowa. You know, University of Iowa, Hawkeyes, Ames, Iowa, all those places about the cows and everything. But, at one time they

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weren’t involved just with soybeans and alfalfa and corn. But, then they went into the dairy business, my wife’s family and brothers and everything. So I know what you are talking about and it’s a kind of sad situation.

But, a lot of things are happening now as far as what needs to be done and what I really want to say without going into it all, being elaborate, I was going to talk about Iowa. I think my wife’s birthday was August 6, so a lot of, some of the people on farms came, which I was very proud of, they came to Los Angeles to my wife’s deal. And they were talking about some of these same things in Iowa. Some of them, my wife’s family they got real problems, you know, with the dairy situation. Real, real problems.

But, I want to say this to you, Mr. Chairman, I think, I've been up here a while. And I can say this is the first time that we’ve had what you call an informational session. This was very informational. Very informational. I think you guys did a great job and I think we should keep going and, you know, what this is not about Democrat/Republican, black or white, in-town or out-town, poor people or rich people. I got a person that was rich. They’re rich and they’re electricity went off the other night. They couldn’t just push the button and it didn’t come back on. You know what I mean?

So what I’m talking about this is a very important situation. And I’ll just say that California, everybody wants to come to California. They really want to come here. And you know what I mean? And so, I think that things that you’ve done today, I tell you, will really help. I think you and your staff have done an outstanding job. An outstanding job. Matter of fact, this is perhaps the best hearing I’ve seen since I’ve been here, this informational hearing. This is really informational. We got a lot out of it and I think with your leadership we can do some things that help. And what’s sad when you think about the fact, we call it a cooling place. How the hell are you going to be cool if you can’t get to the place? You need transportation. You know that’s not going to help you if you can’t get there.

So again, I want to salute you for this, and I appreciate it.SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you, Senator. And I appreciate you sitting

through five hours of this. I very much appreciate it. And I know that there’s a

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transcript that’s coming out and I know the Republican consultant said he would read it the next hearing verbatim, is that right? I do want to thank the ag institute particularly for sticking around. I apologize for you having to sit through. I figured it would be three hours and I apologize getting near five. And I want to thank you. I look forward to working with you and particularly on the composting and burial issues, if there are things that we can do at the legislative level that might expedite that, we would be interested in working with you, as well. I know John Dunlap has been very, very instrumental talking to us, as well, on some of these issues. So just let’s communicate and see what we can do. I know Senator Denham, as well, is going to have a hearing on the heat for the agriculture perspective, and I know that will be helpful also. I’ll get with you ___. Thank you very much.

MR. SERPA: Yes, Senator, and just again, renewable energy, when you consider the ag community, there’s a great resource there, so we need to be aware we need to tap that, to help us going forward.

SENATOR FLOREZ: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Okay, we’ll go ahead and adjourn the Governmental Organization hearing. I very much appreciate everyone being here. Thank you.

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